ati or radeon? driver name confusion

[blackdog]

Hello,

I have a ATI Radeon 7500 card in my emac. I installed YDL 4 and X is working fine.

In the devices section of the XF86Config file, I have the line - driver "radeon" . locate says that the radeon driver is present at : /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.o
So, it seems that the system is using the driver named radeon.

Now, I looked at the documentation at XFree86.org and X.org and both of them say that they have a driver named "ati" but no driver named "radeon". Moreover, I could not locate a driver named 'ati" in my system. So what is the deal here? Where does this "radeon" driver that is present in my sysem come from?

Thanks in advance!!

[DJ_Max]

There are a few sources it could have came from, as anyone with the knowledge can create a driver for X for use with a ATI graphic card.

Most notably, closed source drivers directly from ATI(even though those are for x86, you can still get ones for the PPC)
http://mirror.ati.com/support/drivers/l ... linux.html

Or DRI support from
http://dri.sourceforge.net

As for the ati module, you probably have to compile your kernel for support of the ati module, or similar.