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Radeon 1Gb HD4870 and Debian Etch... garbled screen....

I had Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on here when I had an older Nvidia card. After upgrading to a 1Gb HIS Radeon HD4870, 8.04 didn't work so well. I tried 8.10, which resulted in a white screen. My last attempt was Debian Etch, which has always been good to me.

After installing Debian Etch, and installing the ATI's 9.1 Radeon drivers, I get a garbled screen. I tried running aticonfig in the terminal, but it diplays too much info for the screen. using less or more commands with it don't work. I'm stuck. Any ideas on a solution, am I stuck in too-new-unsupported-hardware hell?

Quote:

Originally Posted by that Linux guy (Post 3443926)

You don't appear to be stuck in any kind of hell. ATI does have a Linux driver for the HD4870. I assume you grabbed that one. What kernel are you running? You need kernel = 2.6.xx
Did you read the installation instructions available on the page where you got the driver-installer file?
Have you run

Code:

fglrxinfo

and got a satisfactory report? Something like this:

Code:

display: :0.0  screen: 0

OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.

OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon 9550 / X1050 Series

OpenGL version string: 2.1.8395 Release

and you verified that the fglrx driver is loaded correctly?

Code:

$ lsmod | grep fglrx

fglrx                1939196  24

agpgart                28776  2 fglrx,amd64_agp

Those are just a few suggestions.
cheers,
jdk

JDKaye, thanks for the reply. I was under the impression that the binary driver and fglrx open-source driver weren't the same thing. I downloaded the Radeon Linux driver direct from AMD, version 9.1. I'll return soon and post the output of those commands.

Quote:

Originally Posted by that Linux guy (Post 3443993)

AFAIK they are not the same; but I don't think I suggested that they were. In any event I use the proprietary driver from ATI because I want 3D acceleration which I haven't been able to get on xorg's driver. I'll check back now and then to have a look at your results.
cheers,
jdk

Ok. I ran those commands you mentiond. I cant copy and paste, so I'm posting from my smartphone.

My kernel is the default kernel for Etch, which is 2.6.18-6-686.

After running fglrxinfo, the results were

Error: unable to open display (null)

After running lsmod with grep for fglrx, there was no output.

Do I need a newr kernel or something?

Quote:

Originally Posted by that Linux guy (Post 3444545)

One thing for sure: your driver is definitely not installed so no wonder you're having problems. Your kernel should be ok but at some point you'll want to change from Etch to Lenny (which is now the stable version of Debian). Maybe do that first and then install the ATI driver.
Cheers,
jdk

Just in case..

http://wiki.debian.org/ATIProprietary

http://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo

and yeah if this is a new install, I would go for Lenny as well, rather than Etch..

Etch may no recognize your card even, which could be causing part of your issue..
does lspci actually show your ATI card or is it listed as VGA (Unknown Device) ?
if it's listed as unknown you can run update-pciids to get lspci to recognize
it but that alone won't solve your other issues.