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Old 03-29-2006, 12:28 AM   #1
theedge981
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Angry ATI Radeon 7000 and FC5


All,

I've done a lot of reading around this forum as well as others trying to see what I could find pertaining to Fedora Core 5 support for the ATI Radeon 7000 AGP video card. I recently installed FC5, but had problems with the "radeon" driver that came pacakged with the distribution. Most suggestions pointed me toward installed the ATI proprietary driver "fglrx", but after many trials and tribulations, it appears that the fglrx driver isn't meant for the radeon 7000. The "radeon" driver packaged with FC3 (I can't speak for FC4 since I never ran it) seemed to work fine with my card and my monitor. Does anyone know if there are any plans in the Fedora community to update the radeon driver that comes packaged with FC5, or am I pretty much out of luck and stuck buying a new card?

Any ideas or thoughts would be welcome...

Thanks!

Dan
 
Old 03-29-2006, 08:44 PM   #2
jbuckley2004
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Dan,
I've been using an ATI Radeon 7000 AGP card for a year under Mandrake/Mandriva and the fglrx driver without a noticable problem. I don't stress it much (I'm not a gamer) but I had no difficulty at installation or when switching resolutions (I happened to buy a new monitor that allowed me to increase resolution).
Perhaps it's not the fglrx driver, but the settings for the card and the monitor together. Sync rates for the monitor maybe? My old monitor worked at 60 hz, but not 70.
 
Old 03-30-2006, 08:06 AM   #3
theedge981
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now running Mandriva 2006

So the fglrx driver has been working for you under Mandriva?

Since my last post, I scrapped FC5 in favor of Mandriva 2006. I'm making progress, but things still aren't perfect. The radeon driver that comes packaged with the distribution seems to do the trick, in FC5 the radeon driver would completely freeze up my machine after about 10 minutes of uptime but that hasn't been the case (progress!). My left screen is fine (1024x768 16bit color), but if I set my right screen to anything other than 800x600 8 bit color, the display looks terrible (by terrible I mean that it's like the left display is ghosted to the right screen or something like that. Did you do anything special to get the fglrx driver working? I know you mentioned it might be something with the monitor settings, but I'm pretty much copying verbatim what I had in an old xorg.conf file which was a copy of something I had in an XF86config-4 file from like 2 yrs ago, so the settings should be correct.

Thoughts?

Dan
 
Old 03-30-2006, 11:22 AM   #4
jbuckley2004
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Dan, I didn't do anything 'special', but then again, my setup is pretty basic (more basic than yours).

I'm pretty sure that the video setup information is all in /etc/X11/xorg.conf (not XF86config in mandriva). My only suggestion (and I'm hoping someone knows more and can offer more help than I) is to run XFdrake from the console as root, and set your parms. from there. That'll let you test the setup before committing to it. I noticed earlier that my card (or the driver or even the old monitor) had problems with 24 bit color, maybe something like the 'ghosted' stuff you mentioned. But 16 bit seems to work fine. Regardless, XFdrake will update the xorg.conf file for you if changes are made.
 
Old 03-31-2006, 04:55 AM   #5
theedge981
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When I first installed both Mandriva and FC5, I scrapped the idea of the 2nd monitor and just wanted to get the 1 proimary monitor working. I figured one thing at a time. The "radeon" driver is ok at best on the primary screen. I can get 16 bit (had the same problem you had w/ 24) and run a 1024x768 resolution. Pretty much what I'm looking for, except that when I use my TV card (using the bt878 module), the tv display is a bit off, it looks like it's stressing out trying to refresh at almost 60fps. I don't know if this is a problem with the tv card or the video card, but that never used to happen before. I can cut the framerate down into the upper 20s and it's fine, but like I said I never had that problem before and it leads me to believe something's wrong with the video driver.... That and the fact that when I do enable the 2nd monitor I can only do so w/ 256 colors....ugh!

Did you install the fglrx driver from ATI? I went through the whole XFDrake process and selected the Radeon (fglrx) option, but that doesn't really seem to use the fglrx driver, it sticks w/ the radeon driver. Can you do a more /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep fglrx
and a more /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep radeon and see what your xorg.conf file is using? I'm curious if its actually using the driver or if XFdrake just labels is as such in the gui...

Dan
 
Old 03-31-2006, 09:45 AM   #6
jbuckley2004
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Dan, I'll check my xorg.conf this evening for you and report back.
I used the fglrx that came with mandriva 2006 free installation disks, (not from the ATI web site). I've been under the impression that they are one-in-the-same, and refered to as the fglrx driver, as well as radeon. Maybe there's some name confusion here, but I think they're the same thing.
 
Old 03-31-2006, 09:48 AM   #7
k9wkj
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the fglrx dirver really only supports radeon 8500 or higher cards
had that trouble with my 7500 swapped in a 9200 and it works great
 
Old 03-31-2006, 07:22 PM   #8
jbuckley2004
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Dan, K9wkj is probably right. You're probably trying something that the card can't do (or at least, can't with the fglrx driver), but I'm surprised it caused FC5 to just hang up. Maybe the real problem is that the card is old and is about to give up the ghost, as they say. You may want to invest in a 8500 level card (or better - they're not too bad on ebay) if you want to revert to FC5 or use the dual monitor on either.
For what it's worth, the relevant section of my xorg.conf file reads:
Section "Device"
Identifier "device1"
VendorName "ATI"
BoardName "ATI Radeon (fglrx)"
Driver "ati"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
 
Old 04-01-2006, 08:13 AM   #9
theedge981
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Yeah, the more and more I battle with this, the more I realize that I should probably throw money at the problem and buy something that's supported better. Although, and maybe others who are more knowledgeable in this area than I can answer this, what happened over the past year and a half (since I last upgraded my distribution) that would cause a supported card to be left by the wayside? I was running both Mandrake 9.1 and 10.0 using the default radeon driver without a problem to speak of! Likewise I was running FC3 with the default radeon driver. Now I can't get FC5 to stay 'unfrozen' for more than 5 mins using the radeon driver, and I have to deal with sub-par framerates with it in Mandriva 2006. Does this have something to do with the transition toward xorg? MDK 9.1 and 10.0 used XF86 and FC3 used an older version of xorg - have new upgrades to xorg left previously working modules by the wayside? Just curious, if anything I expected previously supported hardware to continue to be supported and functioning like it did in the past, not the other way around.

I put in a bid on a Radeon 9200 which looks like it'll be supported by the fglrx driver from ATI. Hopefully that'll solve the problem. That and the extra 96mb of video card should help things too I presume :-)

Dan
 
  


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