Equiped with two computers, several distros and kernels, and after countless hours of forums-reading I learned a couple of things so far. 70% of the users made it to install after going through problems that can be solved by reading -carefully!- the many howtos out there (the best so far was gentoo faq on prohosting dot com). The other 30% returned to windows or bought nvidia.

Being a FC4 user, my first problem was that one step was missing in the fedorafaq description:

-one must update the kernel (or better, everything) in order to install ati-fglrx and the matching kernel-module.

If you have nForce or KT4xx, or some other special chips, check the gentoo ati faq and the rage3d howto's for instructions (just adapt for your distribution), you will probably need to configure a source kernel.

There are many other specific issues! Search on forums like this for all distros on keys like your motherboard chipset, ati chip, xorg.conf error, before posting that is (there are many clone threads out there!).

Now here is mine, shortened! Installing Ubuntu, and the ATI proprietary drivers, resulted in the same error as in the procedure I'm describing below, that was always performed as root (I'm praying it isn't a permission thing):


My pc recipe is a:

ASRock 775Dual-880Pro (PT880 Pro chipset)
w/ Pentium IV 630
FC4 (dvd, x86_64)
Samsung 930BF LCD with dvi
DDRII RAM PC533
GeCube 9600xt 256 mb (listed as 9600pro chipset)
SATA HD.


I started with a fresh install of fedora and a yum installation of a recent kernel (2.6.14-1.1644_FC4). Following standard yum procedure, I installed the respective (and matching!) livna drivers for ati (ati-fglrx and kernel-module-fglrx..). Yum updates xorg.conf by changing "radeon" to "fglrx", and adding the "VideoOverlay" "on".

After a reboot, everything seems to be fine (graphical startup is ok) untill it gets to the login part where the signal simply vanishes leaving a black screen (also replaced the dvi connection with analogue, same result). My lcd warnes me of that, but linux doesn't crash at all, I can ctrl-alt-del and it reboots after the usual time. Xorg.0.log appears to be just fine, minus usual non critical warnings, it loads about everything it should!!!

The next common sugestion was to specify the "UseInternalAGPGART" "yes" or "no". The first case results in the previous symptom, the latter provides no DRI, only Mesa (/dev/agpgart is activated in the kernel, though the recent kernels have dropped the "Via chipset support", so I couldn't try it). Doing fglrxconfig also results in the previous two errors.

As you can see having a error free log can be quite frustrating! Mind you all, this configuration works for many people! Also, my motherboard works (check Phoronix) with nVidia.

I know there are other people with this error, but I haven't received their reply yet, probably they've given up.. Please post here and let's solve this all together!

edit: forget this message, didn't worked (seemed so much)

If I'm right, this is a known bug, but solvable!! Like many people described in this forum, a restart of x results in a black screen. Well, fedora loads x twice, being the second to display the login window. Therefore crashes. If you look at the ati unofficial buzilla for linux (please search google, and keep that address!), you'll find bug Restarting X Server Hangs System, there are solutions there posted!

I'll try and return with my solutions next week. Then I'll write a HOWTO so nobody suffers what I did :S

Well, I'm going back to believing this is motherboard related. Anyone got a via pt880 pro chipset working with ati?