I have a Dell i8000 laptop with the ATI Mobility M4 video card installed. Though I am able to run the NeHe tutorial examples, I am unable to get direct rendering to work. And as it appears that none of the rendering is done by the hardware, all my GL apps run hopelessly slow.
I had a similar problem with my ATI Rage 128 and couldn’t run with direct rendering except as root. I finally found a setting in the XF86Config file that allowed everyone to run with the DRI.
Section “DRI”
Mode 0666
EndSection
I sure wish this was the way it was setup by default - would have saved me time.