Problem with ATI card and Viewsonic monitor

English Hardware
#1

openSUSE 12.1 x86_64
KDE 4.7.2
Video card ATI RV280 5961 Radeon 9200
Monitor Viewsonic VA721

“My Computer” says I’m running the Radeon driver.

My reason for creating this mess is that just after I make my selection on the Grub screen, there is a brief period during which my monitor goes blank and an error message is displayed “Out of Range”. I then see the verbose screen and things work normally.

Or at least they did.

After seeing how easy it was to use the proprietary driver using atiupgrade, I decided to take the plunge to see if I could speed up video response.

Turns out my card is not supported. I didn’t recognize that a 9200 card is not a 9200HD card. Big difference.

So, I ran atiupgrade to remove the proprietary driver and supposedly put everything back to the way it was.

Something is obviously not back the way it was because I lost the screen effects, I lost the verbose screen, the Out of Range message stays until the logon screen is visible, and menus have a distorted background and several other annoying screen anomalies are present.

So, I looked at the sticky about installing and running sax3. I did and the effect was to prevent me from attaining level 5. I booted to level 3, logged in as root and removed the 99* files from etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and then rebooted. This allowed me to again access the KDE desktop.

There is obviously something different about my system from before I ran atiupgrade and after. I looked inside all the files in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and everything inside all of the device and monitor files is all commented out. Is there anywhere else a conf file could lurk?

Is there a way to completely remove all the video drivers and then reinstall just the radeon driver?

What about the error message during boot? I have a “vga=0x31a” in the boot string. I found this by trial and error but have not been able to come up with an actual list of what the octal codes actually mean. My monitor supports only 60 and 75 hz vertical rates at the 1280 x 1024 resolution I want to use… I suspect this is the problem but the octal codes seem to only affect the resolution and not refresh rate. Grub comes up as 1024 x 768. openSUSE runs at 1280 x 1024. Obviously, the problem lies in the resolution switch just as Grub exits and openSUSE starts. Could I configure Grub to load at 1280 x 1024? Would that be in a grub configuration file somewhere? How do I specify refresh rate? Is this something that is set by the automatic video until it reads the boot parameter? Is my boot parameter wrong and is the driver overriding it and setting the proper resolution in spite of me?

I seem to find that the AGP slot in my machine is quite obsolete. Is there anything short of replacing the entire system board and all that I can do? I see an HIS card that says it has a Radeon HD 4670 chip. Would it work?

The good news is though, that this is not Windows and I am confident that I/we will prevail!

#2

atiupgrade -d ( or –deinstall) is not the function that has been the most used and tested. But here’s what it does:

  • deinstalls the package fglrx (that includes ATI’s proprietary driver). It won’t delete the kernel module, that is not part of the package, but this module won’t get loaded.
  • asks you if you want to re-enable KMS. What did you do at this point? If you answered ‘yes’ and your monitor behaves strangely, you should try booting with ‘nomodeset’.
  • renames /etc/X11/xorg.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.fglrx. If you had special settings in xorg.conf before, you could just rename /etc/X11/xorg.conf.fglrx to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and replace the line
Driver fglrx

with

Driver radeon
#3

This is normal. atiupgrade doesn’t touch these files.

No, except xorg.conf, which has been renamed.

  • But I doubt you got to the point where xorg.conf would have been created … because aticonfig --initial failed for your graphics card.
#4

There is no xorg.conf file on my drive. There is an xorg.conf.install, but it looks like something that was there all along.

Is the kernel module you mention what was compiled by atiupgrade?

I really don’t remember how I answered the KMS question. Most likely, I accepted whatever was the default. Does the position of nomodeset in the boot parameter line make any difference? It was never in the boot parameters before. There was never any conf file that I know of. I assume (assume?)… I’m guessing that my system used the automated process fairly successfully before I mucked it up.

What would be the name and location of the compiled module? Although I know it isn’t being loaded, I can safely delete it, yes?

If I was using the radeon driver before, and I’m using the radeon driver now, everything should be as it was, shouldn’t it? How or why could it be different? I know I did get an error message saying that the desktop effects had been disabled. If I go to the settings, they are all checked as they were, but the effects don’t work. I really miss being able to put the cursor in the upper left corner and pick the window I want.

#5

Yes… That’s what I thought. aticonfig --initial could not create this file.

Yes.

Not exactly. atiupgrade builds and installs the fglrx package, which in turn compiles the kernel module.

There is no default. The answer is ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

It can be anywhere after the kernel. Put it at the end of the line!

If KMS was disabled before in initrd - because the setup found your old graphics card - nomodeset was not needed and would have had no effect. Now if you enabled it - I guess you did - it was wrong.

Yes.

find /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/extra -name "fglrx.ko"

Yes.

Yes … unless you enabled KMS in initrd. That could be the problem.

#6

I tried using nomodeset on the boot line and there is no change.
I tried using Ctrl-Alt_F12, the combination to turn screen effects off and on, and it sets my monitor to an unsupported resolution, blanking it, and I have to hit the reset button.

I remember back when I first used atiupgrade, you said I should not run it twice. I seem to remember that I misunderstood the resulting message and did, in fact run it twice. I think. Is there something that could have been incorrectly modified by the second pass?

I looked, using yast, for radeon thinking to refresh it. All that showed up was radeonhd. Is the radeon driver part of the kernel? Do I need to recreate the initrd file?

#7

Actually, I think you have KMS disabled my mistake. Do you have ‘nomodeset’ present in your grub config? (I’m thinking that for your 9200, you will want to load the KMS-enabled radeon driver).

openSUSE 12.1 Release Notes

On ATI for current GPUs it falls back to radeonhd. On NVIDIA without KMS the nv driver is used (the nouveau driver supports only KMS). Note, newer ATI and NVIDIA GPUs are falling back to fbdev, if you specify the nomodeset kernel boot parameter.

#8

Maybe I was wrong as I told you to answer “no” in the other thread, while it should have been “yes” indeed. Sorry (it’s old stuff). But it’s easy to fix. Do you see enough to open YasT? Then: Sysconfig Editor → System → Kernel → No_KMS_IN_INITRD … and say “no”

  • No “NO” actually means “yes”.
    Then OK, and it should rebuild the initial ramdisk, I guess (otherwise we will use mkinitrd). Reboot WITHOUT ‘nomedest’ and … solved?

@deano_ferrari,
So, radeon uses/needs KMS, and radeonhd doesn’t (either doesn’t care or doesn’t work)? Is that right?

#9

By grub config, do you mean menu.lst? If so, no. There is no mention of nomodeset there. Looking in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, I see many references to RADEON(0), so I assume it is actually the radeon driver that is loaded. That’s quite a file and it is very repetitive, but one section in particular stood out with this error message:

    47.621] (EE) RADEON(0): [dri] RADEONDRIGetVersion failed because of a version mismatch.
[dri] This chipset requires a kernel module version of 1.8.0,
[dri] but the kernel reports a version of 2.11.0.[dri] If using legacy modesetting, upgrade your kernel.
[dri] If using kernel modesetting, make sure your module is
[dri] loaded prior to starting X, and that this driver was built
[dri] with support for KMS.
[dri] Disabling DRI.

It appears to me that simply naming the driver I want to use, in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf file is sufficient to cause the loading of whatever driver is specified, provided there is no xorg.conf file in the /etc/X11 directory. Am I correct?

The only other driver I can see that might work would be the radeonhd driver. Should I try naming it in the device.conf file? If it doesn’t work, I’ll be at a command line interface. What can I use as a text editor to change it back?

OR…

Should I just cough up the hundred and fifty bucks for the new AGP card I mentioned?

OR…

Should I wait for 12.2, and start over?

I’d really like to find out what happened.

#10

But if it’s worse and you get a blackscreen or garbage, then use ‘nomodeset’ to disable KMS.

#11

@deano_ferrari,
Actually, I knew he would need radeon, but I didn’t know he would need KMS, because back to the time when we were using the old radeon driver, KMS wasn’t implemented on Linux (and Unix).

#12

@deano_ferrari,
So, radeon uses/needs KMS, and radeonhd doesn’t (either doesn’t care or doesn’t work)? Is that right?

Yes, radeon is KMS aware, while radeonhd isn’t.

#13

The only other driver I can see that might work would be the radeonhd driver. Should I try naming it in the device.conf file? If it doesn’t work, I’ll be at a command line interface. What can I use as a text editor to change it back?

Make sure you have midnight commander (mc) installed, or nano, or pico are simple editors too.

Should I just cough up the hundred and fifty bucks for the new AGP card I mentioned?

A plausible idea.

#14

Well, seeing as the original reason I started was to increase video response, I guess that’s what I’ll do. If the new card has an AMD (ATI) chip, that’s all I need to be concerned with? And, it’ll (should) work properly using the automated drivers that are there already?

#15

$ 150 for an AGP card? Doesn’t it sound exagerated somehow? You can get an ATI (or Nvidia) PCI-E for about $35 already. Well, it wouldn’t work on your motherboard. Actually, you need a new computer IMO.

#16

But if it’s an AGP card, it won’t. You need a PCI-E card, and for that you need another motherboard. :frowning:

#17

Listen to you guys, spending my money! rotfl!

I guess that’s what’ll have to happen. Hate the thought of it though.

Thanks.

#18

AHA! That put it back to where it was! And I can live with it as it is! Thanks!

Now, so I understand… As it was, the nomodeset command was actually being sent even without me adding it to the grub parameters?
By following your directions, I set a system configuration file to put a line in the file (initrd) that has the initial configuration parameters that says the kernel should load the kernel module system. Is that about right?

#19

Now, so I understand… As it was, the nomodeset command was actually being sent even without me adding it to the grub parameters?
By following your directions, I set a system configuration file to put a line in the file (initrd) that has the initial configuration parameters that says the kernel should load the kernel module system. Is that about right?

Yes, that is the second place that controls whether a KMS enabled driver is used or not.

BTW, KMS stands for ‘KERNEL MODE SETTING’.

#20

Thank you so much, both of you! I don’t think I would have ever figured it out by myself!

All software has problems, glitches, little configuration things that aren’t obvious to everyone. It’s the support that makes all the difference.

The openSUSE people, volunteers all, who make this OS such a pleasure to use! Thanks again for your patience, understanding and help!