How to install XGL on an ATI card-powered Gentoo Linux machine running KDE

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This guide will show you how to install the XGL extension on a Gentoo Linux machine. Although this guide is aimed at ATI users, you can safely use any video card. In order to get some usable performance, your card should support hardware graphics acceleration and have at least decent support for OpenGL. If your card is an ATI or nVidia one and is not older than three or four years, you should be safe.'

You can also safely use any other desktop than KDE, but bear in mind that you will not be able to use KDE's composite manager in this case.

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Steps

1. First, go to this page: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_XGL#Hardware_Prerequisites . It lists the cards supported by XGL, as well as some issues it has with unsupported chipsets or composite managers.

2. You should now enable unstable packages in /etc/make.conf . You can also try to enable only the unstable packages required by XGL. If you choose to enable all unstable package, edit /etc/make.conf and, on the line that starts with ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=, add ~<arch>, where <arch> is your architecture. For example: 

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"

Note that you should not try to emerge the world package at this moment.

  • However, if you choose to enable only the unstable versions of the packages XGL requires, you will need to edit /etc/portage/package.keywords and add all masked packages. Refer to the relevant documentation in the file and on the Gentoo wiki for details on this.

3. Now update your package list to the latest version, using: 

emerge --sync

You can also emerge world now.

4. Install the 7.0 modular X.Org server now. You can now safely proceed to download the XGL sources, compile and install it.

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