Problems with ATI Radeon 9850 and fglrx drivers

[SurplusIguana]

Originally Posted by incognito9

I suspect you may have the wrong driver installed. ATI stopped supporting some of the older cards in it's latest drivers, and I think the 8xxx/9xxx series support was nixed.

I would go to ATI's web site and download the drivers from there. Follow their instructions to build your own RPM, install it and see if that works.

I mistyped when I named the thread; it's a 4850, not a 9850 x_x

I downloaded the latest drivers from ATI and installed them, and then I created a completely new xorg.conf. However, I noticed that VLC is doing worse than it was before. I think I'm going to try radeonhd and see if they're any better.

[caf4926]

It may be just the video playback setting you need to alter in vlc
oFten this works:

switch the output video mode of your multimedia player from "auto" or from "xv" (xvideo) to "x11"

[SurplusIguana]

I tried all the setting that seemed useful (OpenGL, xvideo, x11, SDL, even framebuffer).

So I didn't have much luck getting radeonhd to work. Apparently I suck at this sort of thing. Installing the new drivers caused the error messages to go away, so I guess technically my issue has been solved, though if I knew that the price of the solution would mean that resizing videos would cause the frame rate to drop to 1 fps and that I would lose half my KDE settings through some freak failure, I might not have messed with it in the first place :/

[caf4926]

You are not using desktop effects are you!?

[SurplusIguana]

No, I'm not.

[caf4926]

You could consider removing the driver you have and go to ATI. I went here:
ATI Catalystâ„¢ Proprietary Display Driver

I didn't know if you were _64bit, but I followed x86. It seems to indicate it's for both, but if you are _64 I would go back and just follow it thru the _64.

The installer instructions are:

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206...cat92-inst.pdf

And main points are:

•
The following packages must be installed in order for the Catalyst™ Linux
driver to install and work properly:
• XFree86-Mesa-libGL
• libstdc++
• libgcc
• XFree86-libs
• fontconfig
• freetype
• zlib
• gcc


You must be su to install.
To install the ATI Proprietary Linux driver using the Automatic option, follow
these steps:
1 Launch the Terminal Application/Window and navigate to the ATI Propri-
etary Linux driver download.
2 Enter the command sh ./ati-driver-installer-9.2-x86.x86_64.run to launch the
ATI Proprietary Linux driver installer.
The ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Setup dialog box is displayed


3
Select Install Driver and click Continue. The ATI License Agreement will be
displayed.


Choose Automatic and accept Licence

6
7
8
Exit to close the ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Installer.
Launch the Terminal Application/Window and run:
• For versions of X.Org newer than 7, /usr/bin/aticonfig --initial to config-
ure the driver for your ATI product.
• For versions of X.Org older than 7, /usr/X11R6/bin/aticonfig --initial to
configure the driver for your ATI product.
Reboot your system.
You have successfully installed the ATI Proprietary Linux Driver.

[SurplusIguana]

That's actually exactly what I did . I removed the fglrx driver that I had installed via YaST and I downloaded the latest one from ATI.

[tcubed_bus]

I have a middling-old video card, a Radeon 2600. The last half-dozen fglrx drivers have installed perfectly on my AMD64 box. I just download the .run file, run it in single user command line mode, and accept all the defaults.

Per AMD/ATI advice, I avoid SAX. Just reboot after aticonfig.

Incidentally, /etc/X11/xorg.conf is becoming less relevant. For sure, you can dispense with most of the font entries, and all of the modules. See /var/log/Xorg.0.log for details.

User djdoo at the compiz site has lots of great suggestions for xorg.conf contents.

HTH