ati driver not activated - how?

English Hardware
1

I am running Suse11 32bit and am in possession of a Radeon 9550 graphics card. Although I’ve on Suse for a few months now, I’m still very much of a newbie.

Here is (are) my problem(s):
I have just installed the latest ati driver from the open suse-1-click install. I did the “sudo aticonfig --initial” and restarted.
Now sax2 tells me (yet again) that it can’t deactivate all displays. The ati catalyst control centre has most options greyed out.
fglxgears freezes my computer and according to some post, when typing glxinfo, it should Ati as the driver and not still mesa.

How can I activate the ati drivers? My graphics card can’t even handle neverball, even with the options set to absolute minimum.

Any help is very much appreciated, as I’m at my wits end!

2

If you go to the terminal and type su, enter root password and enter the command

init 3

This will allow you to exit the x-server. For sax2 to work properly, you cannot have the x-server running.

Next, log in as root and run this command

sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx

Sax2 should start, but if you get errors try

sax2 -r

Sax2 will run and if you go to “change settings” you can check that 3d acceleration is activated and that you monitor and resolution are correct. When you are done, save settings and when you get back to the command line, type

reboot

That should do it. If the driver is still not working, confirm that your kermel version and the version of the driver match, and that your card is supported by the driver.

If memory serves, there may be a problem with 9500 support and this driver.

If you card is indeed not supported, you should follow the steps above and use this command to go back to the stock radeon driver

sax2 -r -m 0=radeon

When sax2 starts, see if you can check the 3d acceleration box. Some cards can get 3d support using the stock radeon driver. Good luck!

3

Thank you very much. I’ll try that now.

I did have the 3d box ticked before I installed the ati-driver, but because I couldn’t play any 3d game, I figured it must have something to to with the driver not being installed.

How do I ckeck if the kernel version and the driver version match?

4

Thank you very much, foresthill! That worked. It seem my machine is too slow for neverball…:frowning:

5

So what happened? Is your card supported?

You can test to see if you have the driver working or not by running

fgl_glxgears

If you get errors, this means the ATI driver is not properly configured or your card is not supported.

Does the Catalyst Control Center work now? It should list what driver you are using for Open GL support. If it says ATI = good. If it says Mesa = bad.

6

Has anyone tested this on an integrated graphics card with 790GX chipset (3200 radeon onboard) yet?
Because I have the same problem and will try to fix it with the guide I found in this thread tonite.

7

Good morning,
well, when trying fgl_glxgears, I get the following error “Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
Segmentation fault”.
The catalyst control centre still has bits greyed out. It also shows mesa as the driver. But what’s even weirder it shows the bus setting as 0. I know it should be 8.

My husband has a radeon hd2600 and the same os (on a faster computer), and I tried video driver install on his computer and everything worked a treat.
Maybe I should change my graphics card or has it got something to do with the motherboard (Asustek K8N-E)?

8

I was thinking that your card may not be supported by the new driver, since ATI has abandoned Linux support on many older models.

However, it looks like the 9550 is supported by the latest driver. So that leads me to believe the kernel version of the driver and your Linux kernel version may be different.

To get your Linux kernel version type in the terminal

uname -r

And then if you go to Yast / Software Management / and do a search for fglrx you’ll see the two files that were installed when you ran the one click installer.

Down below there are some tabs such as “File Information” and one of those should tell you the full file name and usually the kernel version that the driver was intended to be used for is included as part of the file name. Make sure it matches your kernel. If not, that’s most likely why the driver won’t activate.

One thing you might try while in YAST is to right click on the two ATI driver files and choose “update” (making sure you have a live internet connection) and YAST may find a better driver for you in one of the repositories, so be sure to try that.

Good luck, and the good news is that your card is supported, so now it’s just a matter of coaxing it into working, which is generally doable, it just may take some time and patience.

9

Funny you should mention kernels. After installing the ati-driver I had the following problem, which I posted in the Boot/login forum
graphics driver install results in too many boot entries - openSUSE Forums

My kernel version is: 2.6.25.16-0.1
the fglrx driver versions are
ati-fglrx-kmp-default-8.522_2.6.25.16_0.1-1.1
x11-video-fglrxG07-8.522-2.6
The update only installed the same drivers again. But I did notice, that there is a pae driver available, with the right version number. Should I install that and boot into pae instead of default? If yes, how do I do that?

Going through your aforementioned steps again, after the fglrx update, didn’t make any difference.

10

Ok, forget the last post…

How do I make the kernel and the x11-fglrx match? The update keeps downloading the same version (8.522-2.1).

11

It appears that your kernel version and driver version match, so that’s not the problem.

I think if you go into YAST and right click and uninstall both fglrx files, then go back and install the PAE version along with the other file, that should get the PAE version to install. Then see if that combo will run on your system.

If that still does not work, there is a driver available from the ATI site that will most likely work:

ATI Catalyst™ 8.10 Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver

And here are the official ATI instructions:

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/linux_cat810-inst.html

However, this driver is harder to install and requires some other programs be installed first (from the instructions):

System Recommendations

For best performance and ease of use, ATI recommends the following:

* Kernel module build environment - should include the following:

Kernel source code: Either the Kernel Source or Kernel Headers packages

* ISSE Support enabled in your Linux Kernel

Applies to Intel Pentium III and later CPUs only
Enabled by default on version 2.4 and later kernels

* The rpm utility should be installed and configured correctly on your system, if you intend to install via RPM packages.

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

These programs can be installed thorough YAST, if you just go through the list one by one. Some of these programs don’t exist in Suse, so if your search turns up “no results” don’t worry, just move onto the next program.

These programs are required because the installer actually “builds” a custom driver for your system.

There are two ways to use the installer. It can either generate an RPM for your system, which can then be installed through YAST, or there is the “automatic” install which builds a driver for your specific kernel.

The latter way is the method I use on my notebook, which has ATI graphics, and it seems to have a higher success rate than the one click method.

12

Good morning foresthill,
I thought the 1-click install was the same driver as the driver from ati.

I have tried both methods and none of them worked. When I do the rpm method, it still shows mesa, fgl_glxgears don’t work, bus=0 etc.

And if I do the automatic install I get an error message about kernel-mismatch.

I had already removed the pae-kernel by the time I read your post.
To be honest, I feel we have spent too much time trying to sort this out and since I bought a new motherboard I might as well buy a new graphics card.
I’ve been told nvidia work better with linux.
Thanks again for your help and support, but I give in.:frowning: