A year ago I wrote a rather successful article on getting OpenGL right on a Gentoo Linux system. It was not straightforward to do and it I must confess the graphics setup didn't work anymore after a while. But still it appears to be of help to some people.

Now I switched to Arch Linux I had to get this right again. And it turned out to be so much simpler!

The hardware is the same as in the previous article: Thinkpad T42 with an ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility (r300 chip) and I'm using the kernel shipped by Arch Linux. On the userland side, make sure to install the open source ATI drivers:

This should pull in all required packages to get acceleration. After that, make sure to add yourself to the video group! It was a detail I missed and I wondered why my framerates was a fraction of what I've seen in Gentoo. So execute the following

and restart X. Check with glxinfo and glxgears if everything is working properly.

So no more messing around with xorg.conf, everything works by auto-detection.

However, for some applications (e.g. Google Earth) this is not enough. Just like the Gentoo article, you'll need to make some DRI adjustments to make Google Earth work smoothly. You can download the attached drirc.arch file and store it as ~/.drirc. This file is generated with driconf, by enabling Disable Low-impact fallback (such that the button shows Yes).

You're ready to go. This was such a breeze compared to the configuration hell I went through in Gentoo.