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My Inspiron 6000 comes with ATI X300 graphic’s chipset, and some might come with intel graphic’s driver, depending on how do you customize your order.

Starting from Radeon 9200, ATI had closed it’s graphic chipset’s specification, making it hard for linux developers to develop drivers for it. Users with later models will onlly get 2D acceleration using the normal drivers.To get DRI and/or 3D acceleration to work, I’m aware of two options:

1. get the open source driver from r300.sourceforge.net, or
2. use the proprietery driver from ATI itself.

Though naturally I would promote open source, but since the r300 project hasn’t come out with a stable release yet, and installing the proprietary driver with gentoo is a snap, I go for the later option. Gentoo portage system make things really easy when it comes to installing packages;

1. Configure kernel: Kernel configuration need to be as the following

Loadable Module Support --->
[*] Enable loadable module support
[*]   Module unloading
Processor type and features  --->
[*] MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) support
Device Drivers --->
Character Devices --->
<*> /dev/agpgart (AGP Support)
<*> Your_AGP_Chipset_Here
[ ] Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0 and higher DRI support)

2. Emerge/install the ati-driver

# emerge --sync
# emerge ati-drivers

3. Switch to the ATI OpenGL libraries

# opengl-update ati

4. Configure

fglrxconfig

The fglrxconfig will ask for questions regarding your system, and in the end it’ll produce the /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Here’s my xorg.conf file just in case you couldn’t get yours right.

If thing goes well, we should get "direct rendering: Yes" when running the glxinfo command;

# glxinfo | grep rendering
direct rendering: Yes

Optionally we can test the performance by running glxgears

$ glxgears