Grub, fgrlx ..

Bller · 09-17-2009, 12:37 PM

I have a few questions regarding Grub and the non free fgrlx radeon driver.

I did an #apt-get update and #apt-get upgrade and upgraded my system from the stable and unstable repository. and it upgraded a few things, and then i noticed it installed a new 2.6.30 kernel, wich it see in the grub loader. I have to like chose between the default 2.6.30 or 2.6.28 kernel in wich my system can boot. I tried both, but i noticed that kernel 2.6.30 won`t let my sound work. I tried 2.6.28 and it works fine. If there would be a fix for the sound, please post it, if not please tell me how can i remove the 2.6.30 option from my grub loader.

Seccond i have installed fgrlx-driver and a few other things related to it, like fgrlx control pannel and thing, i rebooted, and when i try to acces the control pannel, it says that i don`t have any supported ATI video card although i have a 9550 256MB Radeon card installed. I tried running #aticonfig in the terminal and i get the same message. Should i try removing the default x-org driver, or something?

Thank you.

jim_p · 09-18-2009, 02:06 AM

First of all it's not grub to blame. Grub is there to provide you with boot options and I assume it did that perfectly.

I had a similar problem with 2.6.30 as I say in this thread

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...branch-747707/

Is there any change you have the same audio device?

I have concluded that the module needed for the audio device to work (snd_via82xx) is probably faulty in kernel .30 and up, because I get the same symptoms in .31rc6 . I used debian's kernel archive to install kernel .29 and sound works perfectly there. For now I just wait for .31 final to reach the repos so as to retry. If this still doesn't work, I will post a bug report.

Since fgrlx 9.3 ati dropped support for all gpus below X1xxx, and made an fglrx-legacy driver for those. That driver is not in some repo, but that's ok since your card is fairly old to be fully (and more properly imho) supported by the opensource radeon driver (3d and 2d acceleration).
So just remove all fglrx-* and make an xorg.conf if necessary.

mf93 · 10-02-2009, 10:48 PM

I had innumerable problems with the debian prepackaged fglrx driver---I would HIGHLY recommend uninstalling that and installing the driver from ati's site. Also, if you have an xorg.conf already made, make sure something is in it---when I was trying to fix my fglrx i found xorg.conf was empty- you have to do aticonfig --initial then reboot.

xenios · 10-04-2009, 01:27 PM

What may be at issue:

Downloading from two different repos creates a mixed system. Lenny and Squeeze each has its own version of the kernel, the fglrx driver, fglrx-modules, xorg and support libraries. For example, if using the fglrx driver version from Lenny and the fglrx-modules version from Squeeze, it won't work.

Unless you're upgrading to Squeeze for a specific purpose, my suggestion would be to comment out the Squeeze repos in /etc/apt/sources.list, update, and stay with a Lenny system.

mf93 · 10-10-2009, 04:03 PM

Code:

yourComp:/home/you# modprobe snd_hda_intel
yourComp:/home/you# depmod
yourComp:/home/you# ldconfig
yourComp:/home/you# reboot

make sure these are ran either as root or using the sudo command

j1alu · 10-10-2009, 05:25 PM

opinions vary on that, but im of the ones who say you either run stable *or* you run testing or unstable (or a mix of testing/unstable).

if you wanna get rid of the entry open /boot/grub/menu.lst and remove the lines which point to it (or comment them out).
if you remove the kernel:

Code:

apt-get remove --purge linux-image-2.6.30-2-686

(or similar) grub should take care of it and remove the entry on its own. How exactly the kernel is called you may find out if you got a look at the entries in /boot.
(a kernel puts some MB into the boat, so if you aint able to use it you may wanna remove it instead of just removing the entries).

as said: i would stick with lenny/stable as it is...well: stable and you aint got much of trouble with it once it is running.

atm the entries for stable in /etc/apt/sources.lst should be more or less useless. You are running debian unstable (as far i can tell). an apt-get upgrade upgrades all the newest versions availiable. you cant go easily back to lenny/stable now (it is possible, from what i`ve heard, but a pain in the butt)

I would remove the entries for stable, add the ones for testing, check for a how-to run a mixed testing/unstable debian and check for pinning (eg: make an entry in /etc/apt/apt.conf:

Code:

APT::Default-Release "testing";

and if you wanna smash in an unstable package run:
apt-get -t unstable <package-name>)

Testing is quite stable, so theres no need to be concerned about it. If all screws id go for a re-installation of lenny and stick with it and the backport-repos.

greetings