hello all....

well i'm porting debian over to my main machine, but have hit a snag installing x.

i've tried configuring with the generic vesa and radeon drivers and neither works.

here's how it pukes (the last few lines anyway)

(WW) RADEON: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:1:0:1) found
(DD) No devices detected.

FAtal server error:
no screens found

i run lspci and get

...
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4966 (rev 01)
01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unnkown device 496e (rev 01)

i've been betting on this thing for about two hours and havent made a dent any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,
barry

You're probably using a Radeon model that was released after the build of X you're using which is fairly easy given how behind-the-times Debian's XFree86 builds are. I can't even get my Radeon 9500 Pro working right with the native XFree86 drivers in XFree86 4.3.0 (it loads but at a horribly low refresh rate and when I quit X I have to reboot to get a usable console back as it selects a refresh rate below what my monitor can handle) aso I dread to think how the 4.2.0 build in Sid (and possibly Sarge) or even the 4.1.0 build in Woody would cope with it.

You can fix this by either downloading new DRI drivers from SourceForge or, depending on what model Radeon you have (thes work with everything from the Radeon 8500 and up I believe), you might have better luck downloading the genuine ATi Linux drivers from their site. Just pick the appropriate driver for your build of XFree86, make sure you have the source package for your kernel installed and set up correctly (if you apt the kernel source that should be handled automatically), use the rpm2targz tool to convert the RPM to a tarball and then do the following:

With any luck, the driver will compile and install alright and need only a run through with the fglrxconfig tool to set up an XF86Config-4 file before you can startx.

It might simply be a mismatch in your XF86Config-4 file if you've changed motherboards. Check the XF86Config-4 file for the correct BusID in the relevant Device section:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Your Video Card"
Driver "vesa"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
...
EndSection

There should also be a corresponding Screen section:

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "Your Video Card"
....
EndSection

cheers

duelly

thanks for the good info, i tried duelly's approach to no avail
i've grabbed the rpm from ati's site but i do not have the rpm2targz tool on my computer
how do i go about installing it?

i tried to grab alien, but apt-get said it was obsolete or some such thing

thanks again,
barry

scratch that... added some apt sources and have alien....
will post again when the next thing blows up in my face

barry

Yeah, I noticed Debian doesn't supply the rpm2targz script nor supply and easy way to install it (apt-cache search rpm2targz turned up nothing as did searching the package archive at debian.org). What I did when I installed the ATi drivers on my Debian install was download the RPM in Slackware, convert it to targz there before copying it into the Debian chroot and compiling and installing it. Seeing as that's probably not an option for you, I did a bit of digging and it turns out the LFS guys anticipated this situation and put not only rpm2targz, but also a deb2targz up for download on one of their sites:

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~tushar/downloads/

wow, thanks for the help

i've made some progress... i've messed with the make.sh file and got it pointing to my kernel includes
but now when i run the make i get:

Error:
XFree86 drm includes at /lib/modules/2.4.18-bf.2.4/kernel/drivers/char/drm do not fit this driver.
This driver is designed to only work with X4.1.0 or higher.
You can match this by getting Linux kernel 2.4.8 or higher.

i know i have X4.1.0.1 so i guess the question is, how do i make the script know?
now i've dinked with the drmincludes line but have not made any progress
i am a complete newbie to linux, but i'm guessing i need to get some source for the xserver and point the drm includes there.

but i've sifted through dselect and no "xsource" type package jumped out at me

also i suppose i could get the newer kernel, but i really have no idea how to do that and i thought the X source might be a better way to go.

so LSD, you've been a huge help, but i'm stuck again

also, how can a download a file from the command line?

much appreciation,
barry

You can download files from the command line using the 'wget' utility. It isn't installed on Debian by default but apt-get install wget should fix that fairly quickly.

You shouldn't need to install a new kernel just yet as you're already running a later kernel than what it's suggesting but what I do suspect is missing is the kernel source. Try installing the source for that bf24 kernel and trying again.

i've gotten the bf24 headers and source, but i've searched for all the drm directories and blindly pointed the drmincludes line to each of the directories.... the script was not satisfied....

it's a mystery,
barry

post script:
it says kernel 2.4.8 and my kernel is 2.4.18-bf.2.4, at first glance my kernel is not the newer one, but maybe i don't understand the numbering scheme

thanks, you've been a big help

I still think something is wrong with the way the kernel source is installed as an error similar to yours came up amongst the Slackware guys and installing the kernel source was the solution but as you say you've installed the kernel source and it's still not working there's a couple of things you can try. Before you start though, first remove the modified drmincludes line and stick with the default, extracting the original make.sh from the tarball if necessary.

Next, make sure that the build symlink exist /lib/modules/<kernelversion>/ and that it points back to your exact kernel source directory (which will be most likely something along the lines of /usr/src/linux-2.4.18-bf.2.4). I don't know if this is typical of all Debian kernel-image packages but I just checked the sid box of mine here which uses a stock Debian kernel image and that symlink didn't exist but then, I haven't installed the kernel source on that box so it's possible that it is created but only by the source package. In any event check it as it's important to the success of the make.sh script and could be one of the reasons why they aren't compiling right. The other thing you should check is that the symlink /usr/src/linux has been created and points to the correct kernel source tree (which again should be something like /usr/src/linux-2.4.18-bf.2.4) as this is also important to the correct compilation of the drivers.

With regard to the kernel version, I'm pretty sure yours is the later as 1) there's no kernel 2.4.80 (the trailing zero is important) that I'm aware of and 2) the .18 I believe means it's the 18th stable release of kernel 2.4 meaning it's a full 10 releases ahead of 2.4.8 which is the 8th release.Having at least 2.4.8 is important as this was the first version of the kernel to include the drm headers needed by the ATi drivers and without them, the build will die with an error similar to yours.

To my knowledge, the X source isn't needed to successfully build the ATi drivers as I've never needed it personally and none of the Slackware guys expressed that they needed it either. I'd concentrate on making sure the make.sh script can find the files it needs in the places it expects to find them first.