Video card fun

A couple of new colour Barco monitors arrived yesterday for one of the diagnostic workstations over in Ultrasound. The monitors shipped with ATI FireGL video cards of an unknown model (read: I didn’t look all that closely at the card before I popped it in), but since the workstation already has video cards in it, the ones that shipped with the monitors were extra. So I decided to grab one to put in my Fedora 7 workstation at work and see if I could get a dual-head setup running with the spiffy new 21″ LCD monitor I scavenged from the above workstation (it was one of the monitors being replaced by the Barcos, really).
Normally this kind of thing should be easy.

• Download the drivers from ATI
• Build them into the kernel and create a suitable xorg.conf
• Reboot
• Configure for dual-head operation

Naturally, I know better. For some reason, the drivers I grabbed from the ATI site (8.35.5) for the FireGL cards wouldn’t compile at all, so I have a feeling I might be missing something. One of the first errors that popped up was an attempt to link to libstdc++.so.5. libstdc++ is installed, but I have libstdc++.so.6 in /usr/lib, so I’m guessing I need to find an earlier version of the library or install the libstdc++ compatibility package. I didn’t tinker around with it too much this afternoon, so I’ll have to play around a little more tomorrow.
Boots up ok and shows the boot messages on both screens, which is promising. The driver issues are keeping the X server from starting though.
It’ll be cool once I get this going. 3 megapixels of desktop goodness at my fingertips. Woot!