ATI Radeon 7000 AGP 64 MB - Xorg 7.4 won't load with 'radeon' driver
Problem: When using the 'radeon' driver in my xorg.conf I get one of 3 problems. The most common one being that it starts to load X, then I get a black screen and the system locks up hard with the only option of a hard-reset. The 2nd most common one is - X loads up to the desktop but upon pressing Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to exit, I get a black screen and it locks up again. The 3rd (and this has only happened once) It works fine for a short while but then the graphics tear and it locks up.
Right now the only way I can get it working consistently is by using the 'vesa' driver. Which works fine, but OpenGL has to resort to software rather than hardware acceleration - making it painfully slow. 'X -configure' doesn't provide a working xorg.conf 'xorgconfig' doesn't either if I try to use the 'radeon' driver. The card is too old for the proprietary ATI drivers. my xorg.conf is: Code:
Section "Module" If anyone has any suggestions i'd be glad to hear them. For the record I'm using Xorg 7.4 and Mesa 7.2 Monitor is a 15" Northgate Innovations EZX15G (though i seriously doubt the monitor is to blame for this) /var/log/Xorg.0.log doesn't update when the computer locks up so no hints there....and no problems are seen when it actually boots up with 'vesa' |
1. What distro are you using?
2. Have you installed the various xserver-xorg-video packages? 3. If you have those packages have you tried putting in "ati" in place of "radeon" as the driver name? Cheers, jdk |
1.) Not using a distro. Built everything from scratch. But I've tried many flavors of linux on this machine through the years....Ubuntu, Slackware, Knoppix, Fedora Core...etc. None have 'just worked' with it. So nowadays I just use scratch built linuxes so I can cut-down on all the un-needed bloat. Right now I tri-boot Windows XP, Ubuntu 8.10, and my custom linux. Out of those 3 windows is the only one that can properly use my video card - which is a bummer. Ubuntu 8.10 has a 'forcevesa' option set in the bootloader and xorg uses the 'vesa' driver.
As a side note I also can't boot into linux with my TV hooked up to the composite out on my video card otherwise my monitor goes out-of-sync and my TV looks fine. This happens with every flavor of linux and also when I tried out the Windows 7 beta. (a bit of a pain because I have to unplug the TV from the back of my computer when not booting into windows) 2.) I installed every part of Xorg that was suitable to build on the x86 architecture. (with the modular build @ about 300 different packages....I scripted the whole thing so I wouldn't get carpal tunnel lol) So yeah every part of Xorg including the unneeded windows and apple parts are compiled and installed. 3.) I have actually tried the 'ati' driver even though the 'radeon' driver is specifically for my card. The 'ati' driver pretty much had the same results as 'radeon' with one added side effect which i'll get to in a second. But yeah, 'ati' would either give me the black screen lock up on starting X, leaving X. Or - 2 times it actually let me ctrl+alt+backspace without crashing it left me at the prompt but it left this strange side effect. I normally have my $PS1 and $PS2 env. variables set to red for root and green for normal users. After exiting X successfully with the 'ati' driver my $PS1 and $PS2 variables were set to strange colors.....what was once green was a dark but still readable gray and I don't remember what color root's prompt turned but you get the point. Some other things were strange colors too...I think probably the colors of things listed with 'ls' but I can't remember. Though I do remember whatever I typed still came up white as normal. But yeah a bit strange eh? One more thing I figured I may want to include is that I'm running kernel version 2.6.28.5 - had the same issues with the 2.6.27.x kernel and yes I do have the proper AGP chipset drivers for my mobo. compiled into the kernel. 'dmesg' also reported nothing out of the ordinary. In the past...(haven't used linux since 2.6.26.x kernels) the radeon driver would always load (usually never a crash - if anything just an out-of-sync monitor) It seems that xorg crashes really easily nowadays...or is that just me? I'm thinking the kernel might be playing a part in this too so if there's any suggestions as to what I might want to make sure IS and IS NOT compiled into the kernel - please let me know. |
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