ATI Radeon HD 2400. Graphics woes.
 

Workin' on a project for a friend who has hardware that doesn't get along with linux. After battling through an install process I'm used to seeing run smoothly on all other hardware the installer (Slackware 12.2 installer) announced to me that it could not identify the graphics card and that it was non VESA compliant.

To which I replied "YOU FUCKING LIAR!"

So okay. All sorts of unprecedented obstacles and two hours later I'm finally able to boot into the operating system to see a whacked out framebuffer display. The two little pictures of Tux at the top of the screen during boot are off colored and a weird contrast, startx yields a crazy high contrast unusable gui, and I can not start multiple x sessions.

I installed the ati proprietary drivers, that fixed the gui coloration problem and allowed me to get a proper resolution. However the the penguins still look weird on boot up, and the machine crashes hardcore when I try to start multiple x sessions (eg startx -- :1.) One of the things I'm working on completely hinges on the ability to start two or more x sessions.

I suspect that these problems are rooted in the same cause and are either a result of something wrong in xorg.conf (which I kind of doubt) or something wrong with LILO's configuration. (LILO refused to load three times and I had to do it manually)

Is anyone familiar with this problem? I'm kind of blaming this on the ati card at this point, but I don't see why ati should be this ferociously figthin' against my every effort. It did this in ubuntu as well. I can post a copy of his xorg.conf and his LILO configuration file when I next use his PC.

Have you tried a live CD like knoppix and see how it deals with the card. The HD 2400 linux driver is definitely supported by ATI. Note the requirements:
Have you changed the driver setting in xorg.conf to "fglrx"?
cheers,
jdk

Okay I got it.

Last night I got the ati to work correctly. I changed the xorg.conf to use flgrx as jdkaye suggested. I altered the lilo.conf to use:

append = "video=atyfb:mode:1024x768,font:SUN12x22"

Which was suggested by this guide: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Framebuffer-HOWTO-5.html#ss5.6 in the "Got a ATI?" section. I also built a new kernel with a little extra support, although I only changed a few things. I was using the same guide which is outdated enough (2000) to leave me doing some guess work. I'm working under the assumption that this is not the ideal way to configure this system, but it's the first one that's worked.

I could tell you exactly the changes I made but I am away from his machine and I'd have to check the "diff /usr/src/linux/.config /boot/config-previous-kernel"

It was a hard fought battle last night but I coaxed the man's horrible machine into running multiple x sessions. Never before have I felt so accomplished as when I managed to get basic functionality out of that god damn box.

It's just that now wine isn't cooperating with me.

Exasperated Sigh.

ya, proprietary s**t sucks. that's why linux just works... its not the technology, it's the license.