Issues with Newly defined ATI legacy Cards

[Steve Barrell]

magabooks wrote:

>
> That is good to know I have been waiting to find out if something like
> that could happen. I thought it might be possible that the two would
> conflict even when users where saying that the xorg.conf chooses the
> driver. They made it sound like the other driver just sat there minding
> its own business. That would explain why the system would sometime boot
> up right. A few times only but it happened.
>
> Well its of to kill the fglrx then, whats the worst that could happen.
>
>
> A user also said that I might be able to improve video playback by
> setting it to regular in xorg.conf. They thought it might be set to
> opengl.
>
>

Hi magabooks, I got diverted here from "11.2 Blackscreen resolved ....."
threads in the install-boot-login forum.

I have an Xpress 200M (5975 chip). I currently have no xorg.conf but can get
my lappy to boot up every once in a while ;-)

hwinfo --gfxcard output indicates that driver info #1 is fglrx.

Strange that, because I don't have the fglrx driver according to a file
search (I do have 4 FGLRX_DualHead* files in /usr/share/sax/profile and
that's it) and locate. Xorg.0.log also says it can't load the fglrx driver:

(EE) Failed to load module "fglrx" (module does not exist, 0)


Could it be that it's Mesa that's needs lining up against a wall ? :-)

"lsof | grep -i dri" indicates that Xorg process is using
/usr/lib64/dri/r300_dri.so and there are some libdri*.so files open too.

Removing Mesa should simply disable 3D support - right?

I don't have time to try it myself right now - maybe later.

[Steve Barrell]

I ran "sax2 -r -m 0=vesa" and I have successfully restarted my laptop about
8 times now without any blackscreens, so vesa mode seems to be reliable.

Perhaps someone else has already established this, but I have not noticed
any articles that say so.

I am now looking at updating xorg and mesa.

[magabooks]

What is showing at driver info #O when you run that command. (could you post you output in this thread we are looking for any and all data that might lead to a fix, your laptop spec would help and is your OS 32/64bit)

have an Xpress 200M (5975 chip). I currently have no xorg.conf but can get
my lappy to boot up every once in a while ;-)

hwinfo --gfxcard output indicates that driver info #1 is fglrx.

Vesa works fine its just a little limited as you know. I have had luck with Sax2 -r -m 0=ati. (don't try this if you are happy with vesa as it causes the black screens again)

Using this options causes the black screen issue which I am willing to deal with for the time being as I have found away around it. The kdm crashes at startup as you well know. I found out that I could startup in init 3 and then login and launch the kdm from there. Every thing works better after doing this resolution, 3d, and desktop effects. But there are still a few issues such a video playback and gradients aren't displayed well.

So far it looks like the fglrx that comes on the install cd needs to be black listed. Oldcpu has said that it interferes with the open source radeon driver. I going to remove it and will post if the my system begins to work better.

Thanks

[J100]

ATI Radeon 9800 Series

I have this card in an old server, that shares an monitor, with another system.
The monitor is 22" and there is no way I can upgrade to 11.2 if it works like my
xpress 600m. Before anyone says buy Nvidia I had one in it until last month
when it blew up. But what the heck ATI has good support in opensuse 11.1
no worries. The things you don't see coming.

The question is would the live cd be an accurate test of how the opensource ATI driver will perform?

[Steve Barrell]

magabooks wrote:

>
> What is showing at *driver info #O* when you run that command. (could
> you post you output in this thread we are looking for any and all data
> that might lead to a fix, your laptop spec would help and is your OS
> 32/64bit)

"driver info #0" is showing the driver as radeon. It even does that in Vesa
mode :-(

I want to rule out using hwinfo at this time - I don't know whether to trust
it. I'm having troubles with my laptop so can't post full output at this
time - could be down to some of the messing about I'm doing with it. May
have to rebuild from scratch again soon. I'm running 64bit 11.2. The lappy
is an HP(Compaq branded) nx6325 - Athlon TL60 dual core (2X 2.0Ghz), 4GB
ram, western digital 320GB hdd (not the original and I totally replaced the
ram about 2 years ago). Windoze XP (32bit) runs fine on the lappy with ATI
9.3 drivers, so I have no known hardware problems with it.


>> have an Xpress 200M (5975 chip). I currently have no xorg.conf but can
>> get
>> my lappy to boot up every once in a while ;-)
>>
>> hwinfo --gfxcard output indicates that driver info #1 is fglrx.
>>
>
> Vesa works fine its just a little limited as you know. I have had luck
> with Sax2 -r -m 0=ati. (don't try this if you are happy with vesa as it
> causes the black screens again)

I know all too well to my cost ;-) .

>
> Using this options causes the black screen issue which I am willing to
> deal with for the time being as I have found away around it. The kdm
> crashes at startup as you well know. I found out that I could startup in
> init 3 and then login and launch the kdm from there. Every thing works
> better after doing this resolution, 3d, and desktop effects. But there
> are still a few issues such a video playback and gradients aren't
> displayed well.

yes I agree, it's better to startup in init 3, login and then go to init 5.

>
> So far it looks like the fglrx that comes on the install cd needs to be
> black listed. Oldcpu has said that it interferes with the open source
> radeon driver. I going to remove it and will post if the my system
> begins to work better.

As mentioned, I don't have fglrx. I had tried ATI's Catalyst 9.3 install
the other day (9.3 being the last to support the Xpress 200 series), but I
fell at the first hurdle - 9.3 is too old and has no buildpkg for suse 11.2.

I have tried updated xorg video drivers from
http://download.opensuse.org/reposit.../openSUSE_11.2 but
they're not working for me yet. I also tried Mesa 7.7 from the same place
but reverted back to 7.6. The newer xorg video drivers let me ctrl-alt-f1
when the blackscreen occurs.
That's as far as I've got with playing with newer drivers. I could be
barking [mad!] up the wrong tree, but just about anything is worth a try at
this time !

I'm now looking at the
http://download.opensuse.org/reposit.../openSUSE_11.2 repo.
Dates on the .rpm's there are within the last two days and may just be good
enough to try and use.


>
> Thanks
>
>

[Steve Barrell]

Steve Barrell wrote:

>
> I'm now looking at the
> http://download.opensuse.org/reposit.../openSUSE_11.2 repo.
> Dates on the .rpm's there are within the last two days and may just be
> good enough to try and use.
>

So far, so good. I have just rebooted 9 times and without an xorg.conf in
place.

http://download.opensuse.org/reposit.../openSUSE_11.2 has
certainly come to my aid and hopefully you and others too !

Add this repo and in yast gui mode, click the "Repositories" tab, then
select the new repo by name (I called mine simply "X11 - Xorg"). Just above
the package list pane, click "Switch system packages to the versions in this
repository (repo name)" and note that all the xorg-x11-* packages will be
selected for installation. While the versions of the packages are lower than
the released versions, perhaps this was intentional, Proceed to install the
selected packages. I suggest you also rename out of the way or delete
/etc/X11/xorg.conf . When the package installations have completed, reboot.
If you get the same result as I did, you should have a working X session and
be able to login as normal.

[JWPurple]

Steve Barrell wrote:

>
> I'm now looking at the
> Index of /repositories/X11:/XOrg/openSUSE_11.2 repo.
> Dates on the .rpm's there are within the last two days and may just be
> good enough to try and use.
>

So far, so good. I have just rebooted 9 times and without an xorg.conf in
place.
...

I updated the base libs and the radeonhd driver, and I can now run glxgears. Before it would hang after 2 secs. I'm still getting some artifacts, but that's not too bad.

dog:~ # hwinfo --gfxcard                                                                    
25: PCI 100.0: 0300 VGA compatible controller (VGA)                                         
  [Created at pci.318]                                                                      
  UDI: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/pci_1002_7142                                           
  Unique ID: VCu0.k4xaQTnCms0                                                               
  Parent ID: vSkL.cutpr6XtQiF                                                               
  SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0                                   
  SysFS BusID: 0000:01:00.0                                                                 
  Hardware Class: graphics card                                                             
  Model: "ATI Radeon X1300/X1550"                                                           
  Vendor: pci 0x1002 "ATI Technologies Inc"                                                 
  Device: pci 0x7142 "Radeon X1300/X1550"                                                   
  SubVendor: pci 0x1462 "Micro-Star International Co., Ltd."                                
  SubDevice: pci 0x0400                                                                     
  Memory Range: 0xd0000000-0xdfffffff (rw,prefetchable)                                     
  Memory Range: 0xfdef0000-0xfdefffff (rw,non-prefetchable)                                 
  I/O Ports: 0xde00-0xdeff (rw)                                                             
  Memory Range: 0xfde00000-0xfde1ffff (ro,prefetchable,disabled)                            
  IRQ: 16 (5211 events)                                                                     
  I/O Ports: 0x3c0-0x3df (rw)                                                               
  Module Alias: "pci:v00001002d00007142sv00001462sd00000400bc03sc00i00"                     
  Driver Info #0:                                                                           
    XFree86 v4 Server Module: radeonhd                                                      
  Config Status: cfg=no, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown                                 
  Attached to: #10 (PCI bridge) 


wake@dog:~> glxgears

*** NOTE: Don't use glxgears as a benchmark.
    OpenGL implementations are not optimized for frame rates >> 60fps,
    thus these numbers are meaningless when compared between vendors.

8770 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1753.844 FPS

[magabooks]

The newer xorg video drivers let me ctrl-alt-f1 when the blackscreen occurs.

Just to be clear you updated your xorg and this has give you a reliable startup? If that is so I will be following you in that updat very soon.

[J100]

ATI Radeon 9800 Series

I have this card in an old server, that shares an monitor, with another system.
The monitor is 22" and there is no way I can upgrade to 11.2 if it works like my
xpress 600m. Before anyone says buy Nvidia I had one in it until last month
when it blew up. But what the heck ATI has good support in opensuse 11.1
no worries. The things you don't see coming.

The question is would the live cd be an accurate test of how the opensource ATI driver will perform?

The good news is that the live cd does seem to act as a good tool to tell if your systems is going to boot up fine
while running a legacy card. It has cleared both my old severs Radeon 9800 and my xpress 600m for uses with the
radeon driver.

Magabooks I check to see if gradients failed badly on both machines and they didn't. The gradient issue with web
browsers seems to be a xpress 200 issue. I also tried a friends Compaq laptop that has xpress 200, it wouldn't
start kde at all.

So once again I think the live cd is a good testing tool to tell if your system legacy hardware is going to start right
before you install opensuse 11.2. It can't hurt to give it a try.

[J100]

Model: "ATI Radeon X1300/X1550"

I don't know that this card used the Radeonhd driver, I didn't think
that any legacy card used that driver as I had read that it was for
new cards on another forum.

ATI’s Mobility Radeon™ X1300 goes beyond integrated UMA graphics on thin-and-light notebook PCs, enabling 3D gaming, high quality video playback, and longer battery life. Accelerate graphics performance with the dedicated 90-nanometer process Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and ultra-threaded 3D architecture, enhanced with a ring-bus memory controller and native 16x PCI Express� bus interface. Enjoy stunning effects with full DirectX� 9 Shader Model 3.0 support, and render lifelike 3D characters and scenes with any OpenGL� and DirectX 9 game. Integrated with ATI’s Avivo™ High-Definition1 video and display enhancements and ATI Powerplay2 6.0 advanced power management, Mobility Radeon X1300 delivers exceptional value for mobile productivity and entertainment.

I can't believe that a card that has HD is already legacy.