What drivers for my ATI Mobility Radeon 16MB (Dell Inspiron 4100)

My gut tells me this is too old - there is no good driver support.

Just installed BackTrack 3, hoping for a learning experience. My first order of business is getting all of my drivers properly installed. lspci tells me "VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M6 LY" What does this need?

Fortunately, my the drivers for my Broadcom BCM4306 (revision 3 - uses b43) are built into the kernel, as Backtrack is based on kernel 2.6.215. How can I tell what devices are not properly installed though?

Excuse my lack of knowledge on the subject, linux is very new to me. I took a shell programming class but that does not really help you with this sort of thing!

Thanks,
Hep!

EDIT: After some more research, I have found on the gentoo wiki that it supposedly works on the fglrx driver, as well as others. Which driver would be best? fglrx, radeon, or radeonhd?
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Gentoo_on_Dell_Inspiron_4100

Also, how would I go about selecting that driver >_> (of those three, I only have radeon in my /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers folder).

EDIT2: I ran xorgconfig, selected Radeon, and manually entered refresh rates, resolutions, etc. Seems to be working okay now, but I wonder if I can't do better? glxgears runs at 160FPS which I think is probably pretty good for this aged card. Feedback appreciated.

EDIT3: I do want fglrx, radeon has no 3d support, so I will do better with that! (help me please).

 

You probably want the fglrx drivers I've never used Gentoo, but they should provide you a decent way to install it (I'm assuming that's the distro you're using?).

 

Thanks for the response!

Nope... using BackTrack 3 which is based on Slackware. It's a security auditing distro so there's no "easy way" to do most stuff - probably not the best distro to learn on but I don't want to be chained to Ubuntu. I've used Xubuntu and the fact that you never have to access terminal worked as a detriment to me and my learning process. I'm not using a majority of these tools right now, and for the ones I need I still have what I've been doing, which is run a virtual machine, so if someone wants to suggest a slightly easier distro I would be open to this. Don't make it too easy for me though, I want to get frustrated enough that I have to learn. (See first post and how far frustration brought me in 4 hours)

Keep in mind the system I am using is a P3-M 1GHz/1GB PC133/ATI Radeon Mobility 16MB, so the system must run smoothly on this (No Fedora Core, SuSE, etc)

 

Use Crunchbang linux

 

Thanks Thomas. I think I'm going to install crunchbang to try, but being based on Ubuntu, I'm worried I won't actually learn anything. But then again, I originally gained my fluency in Windows through repetitive use, and it does not require any terminal access either. So let's go!

EDIT: Perhaps nevermind. I'm looking for something more stable.

 

I heard Puppy Linux was the most stable.

Plus it is very cute.

 

Personally, I recommend Gentoo and Arch to anyone seeking a learning experience. They're just the right blend of hardcore and friendly, though for your machine, Arch might be the best choice because Gentoo takes a while on slower processors. (I'm assuming the Inspiron 4100 is i686.)?

Are there any compelling reasons why you should stick with Backtrack? It wasn't made with regular usage in mind. I'm going to use the analogy that a vehicle built around a gun (e.g. a tank) won't be very comfortable. If you really want something equally frustrating, why not go straight Slack? It's much more comprehensive.

 

No compelling reasons for me to be on BackTrack right now - I totally understand your analogy. I am going to take a look at Arch, thanks for the suggestion.

 

Arch is too complex for my needs - it's basically "build a distro."
I installed Xubuntu since xfce will use less system resources than gnome, but it's still pretty slow.
Going to take a look at Slax and Puppy...

Any other suggestions?

 

I sadly can't get my system to take fglrx, only radeon with no 3d support. When I scroll in firefox, my CPU usage rockets up because it's all loaded to the CPU

 

Xubuntu is a good choice. Perhaps I was a bit too hasty in my recommendations. Arch and Gentoo are both targeted towards experienced linux users who want a greater degree of control over their systems, or who just want to learn the internals. They're not suited for the new user who wants to learn about linux in general.

The *buntus are actually very valuable as learning platforms. You'll have a workable system up very easily, and getting it to work just right (as you are doing now) will be a good enough learning experience.

I wish I could help you with your fglrx problem...

 

Yeah, I've had a good time with it so far, had to install drivers for some hardware. Going to go to the Ubuntu forums I think for my video card :\
Thnaks everyone.