It's been a real pain to enable graphics hardware acceleration on my 3.5 year old IBM Thinkpad T42, containing an ATI Radeon 9600 (Mobility). The binary drivers by ATI are just plain crap, causing insane instability to the system (kernel panics everywhere). I called it a day and continued working without acceleration. But applications like Google Earth are a real pain to use like this, so something inside me shouted to get this right.

Now, after so many years, I spent some little more time on it and it works now. Not with ATI's drivers but with open source drivers which came along with the kernel. Finally I can use Google Earth smoothly

First, check if the kernel is configured properly. These options should be enabled (2.6.23 and before):

(or you can make modules of them, I have a higher tendency to build things inside the kernel).

If you had to change any setting in the kernel configuration, you should rebuild the kernel and install it properly, assuming you know how to do that.

It's time to configure Xorg. Make sure to have the line

in /etc/make.conf and re-emerge xorg-server if it wasn't the case.

Then make sure this is in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Restart X and see if you have Direct rendering working. Do this by invoking the command

If it says Yes then you're cool. With No... no idea, hard to help you from here. I'm just a n00b with this kind of stuff.

There was also the option

in my xorg.conf but that resulted in complete lockups of my system. lspci, however, shows that my card and motherboard support fast writing. So I have no idea why this doesn't work for me. But without it I get satisfactory results too.

I think it's time to try Google Earth. But hey, it's still dog slow! But running it on the command line reveals some warnings:

It seems it needs some stuff the driver can't provide so it switches back to software rendering. A bit of Googling resulted in setting some DRI configuration options. Just put this file in your home directory (created with the driconf utility) and rename it to .drirc. The warning will be gone and Google Earth is real smooth now.

But there was still another warning spitted out by Google Earth which was bothering me:

Fortunately not too hard to fix, simply add the following option to the graphics device section in xorg.conf:

And the error is gone.

Finally, after all those years, I can run Google Earth without any binary unstable crap from ATI! Victory!

So all this did the trick for me, but I wonder if this will help anyone else because it's rather specific. Besides, once I have some more time I'll try to get rid of the kernel implementation of the radeon driver and use the ones provided by Xorg sometime. But that's stuff for later.