How to enable direct rendering?

See the excellent MEPIS guides by Saist: http://www.mepisguides.com/Mepis-6/fglrx/ati-driver-installation-part-1.html

Newbie or not Newbie, there's always a question

If you have a current version of MEPIS, the radeon driver should have been enabled by default. It provides direct rendering.

You can check if DRI is enabled by running from a commandline: glxgears -printfps

If you want to run Beryl, you must NOT install the fglrx driver.

If you have a current release of MEPIS, you should always change the ati driver with the MEPIS Xconfig Assistant.

Woo! I got it! Warren, when I tried using the currently installed ATI driver, XServer stopped loading, so I reset that and downloaded an updated package, then, well, it worked just fine. As mentioned earlier, I'm running a PIII 933MHz and an ATI Radeon 9200 128mb PCI card. If any of this is of any use to you, good.

that link is being changed, the guide has been moved to:

http://www.mepisguides.com/Mepis-6/fglrx/dvd/ati-driver-installation-part-1.html

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also, to those who check the forum now looking for information on accelerating Radeon 8500-9200 products, there is a bit of bad news.

R200 acceleration is broken in the 8.25 ATi driver. That also happens to be the default driver in the Ubuntu Dapper Repositories.

R200 Support was officially removed in the 8.29 ATi driver, which was last released in August. That makes the 8.28 driver the last official FGLRX driver to support R200 based products.

While the X.org driver allows for DRI with Radeon series 8500-9250, it is on average anywhere from 100% to 450% slower than the Fglrx 8.24 driver.

Also, all I have on hand to test with is the 8500 AIW. TV out under the X.org Radeon driver is non functional.

So... if you have a Radeon 8500 - 9250 card, and you use a TV, you might as well forget running Mepis 6.0 and 6.5 for now.

Just to clarify a bit, at this time the 6.5 pools offer the fglrx 8.31.5 driver. And remember, so far the fglrx driver is not compatible with Beryl (simultaneous glx and compositing). When ATI makes a driver that supports Beryl, we will add it to the pool. Meanwhile, for accelerated graphics including Beryl, the xorg driver does a fair job.

And a word of warning, precompiled kernel drivers from Debian or Ubuntu will almost certainly not work with the MEPIS kernels.