I have a ATI Radeon HD 4000 PCIe card in my newly installed Slackware 13.1 box. I am having problems understanding how the non-proprietary drivers are used and set up.

Some background: with Ubuntu Lucid, I have no problems out of the box setting up dual-headed display without using the proprietary ati drivers. All compositing effects work and the overall smoothness of the graphics is superb.

I am having my annual expedition into the world of Slackware and this is the first time that I feel it really really is for me. Everything works bar the graphics.

I installed the proprietary ati drivers and there are no issues with the output as a dual-headed display. Unfortunately, individual Windows "grow" a big black border when switching between windows and memory usage is higher than with the non-proprietary drivers (almost 150mb more!) My whole experience with the proprietary drivers is negative. I experienced the same thing using Debian too.

I tried to switch to non-proprietary drivers (ati) , hoping to keep all of my compositing effects (yes! I think they make me more productive..... ) and the dual-headed display (a la Ubuntu.) It's not happening

Changing the driver section of my aticonfig generated xorg.conf to "ati" or "radeon" does not allow composite effects. I copied an Ubuntu xorg.conf (generated while using the live CD) and tried to use that. I currently have no "kicker" (if it's still called that in KDE4) and systemsettings tells me that Composite effects aren't supported by my graphics card.

This is the Ubuntu generated xorg.conf. I am really unsure as to what to do next.

Please show us your /var/log/Xorg.0.log file and the full output of 'LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo'.

Adam

Hello adamk75

For various reasons (and having some time on my hands), I decided to reinstall Slackware from scratch.I wanted to make sure I hadn't made a mistake somewhere along the line. I think that, for some reason, compositing wasn't enabled after my first install and that's when I started messing around with the proprietary drivers. After my reinstall,I have full compositing and all of the desktop effects are smooth.

What I haven't been able to do is set up a single screen across my two monitors. I realise that I have been guided too much by Ubuntu in the past and have just let the work be done for me.

xrandr -q shows:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1280 x 1024, maximum 1280 x 1280
VGA-0 connected 1280x1024+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 338mm x 270mm
1280x1024 75.0* 60.0
1024x768 75.0 72.0 70.1 60.0
832x624 74.6
800x600 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2
640x480 75.0 72.8 66.7 59.9
720x405 75.0
720x400 70.1
640x400 70.0
640x360 70.0
HDMI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-0 connected 1280x1024+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 338mm x 270mm
1280x1024 75.0* 60.0
1024x768 75.0 72.0 70.1 60.0
832x624 74.6
800x600 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2
640x480 75.0 72.8 66.7 59.9
720x405 75.0
720x400 70.1
640x400 70.0
640x360 70.0

xrandr --output VGA-0 --auto --output DVI-0 --auto --left-of VGA-0 gives the following error :

xrandr: screen cannot be larger than 1280x1280 (desired size 2560x1024)
esteeven@paradilla:~$ xrandr --output VGA-0 --auto --output DVI-0 --auto --below VGA-0
xrandr: screen cannot be larger than 1280x1280 (desired size 1280x2048)

I sort of understand the error but I have never done what needs to be done at this stage. There's no xorg.conf to edit by default and I am not sure what I'd put in there if there was

First you will need to create an xorg.conf file. You can do that with 'Xorg -configure' and just copy the generated xorg.conf.new to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. You then need to edit the Screen section and the Display Subsection and add a VirtualLine. My Screen section looks like this:

You could use the same Virtual line, or change yours to "2560 1024". If you run into issues, just show us the xorg.conf file that is created.

Thankfully, newer versions of Xorg and the radeon driver are smarter about this.

Adam

Excellent!!!!! That was easier that I'd dared dream
I am impressed by Slackware 13.1 and its KDE4.
Thanks again!

Hmmmm! I am still having problems. My xorg.conf uses the radeonhd driver. This worked until I rebooted. After a reboot, my desktop started to suffer from "horizontal lines" when moving or clicking on windows. The virtual screen works. I still have the same problem when I suspend compositing.

Strangely, if I edit xorg.conf and change the driver to radeon, the flickering goes away but I get the error that my screen cannot be larger than 1280x1280. What is odder, is that if I then log out of KDE and redit my xorg.conf and change the driver back to radeonhd and log in, the flickering isn't present. Rebooting brings the issue back .........

I'm a bit lost

First, don't use radeonhd. It's practically unmaintained. I'm surprised that 'Xorg -configure' even defaulted to it. Switch to the radeon driver and show us your full /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

Adam

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "X.org Configured"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/local"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/TTF"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/OTF"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/Type1"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/misc"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/CID"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/75dpi"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/100dpi"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/cyrillic"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "dri2"
Load "extmod"
Load "dbe"
Load "glx"
Load "dri"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
EndSection

Section "Device"
### Available Driver options are:-
### Values: <i>: integer, <f>: float, <bool>: "True"/"False",
### <string>: "String", <freq>: "<f> Hz/kHz/MHz"
### [arg]: arg optional
#Option "NoAccel" # [<bool>]
#Option "AccelMethod" # [<str>]
#Option "offscreensize" # [<str>]
#Option "SWcursor" # [<bool>]
#Option "ignoreconnector" # [<str>]
#Option "forcereduced" # [<bool>]
#Option "forcedpi" # <i>
#Option "useconfiguredmonitor" # [<bool>]
#Option "HPD" # <str>
#Option "NoRandr" # [<bool>]
#Option "RROutputOrder" # [<str>]
#Option "DRI" # [<bool>]
#Option "TVMode" # [<str>]
#Option "ScaleType" # [<str>]
#Option "UseAtomBIOS" # [<bool>]
#Option "AtomBIOS" # [<str>]
#Option "UnverifiedFeatures" # [<bool>]
#Option "Audio" # [<bool>]
#Option "AudioStreamSilence" # [<str>]
#Option "HDMI" # [<str>]
#Option "COHERENT" # [<str>]
#Option "ForceLowPowerMode" # [<bool>]
#Option "LowPowerModeEngineClock" # <i>
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "Unknown Vendor"
BoardName "Unknown Board"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
Virtual 2560 1024
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

Thanks for helping!

Dur! I feel stupid. I added "Virtual 2560 1024" to the display with "Depth 24" and all seems to work.