Hello,
I recently installed a 2.4.23 prerelease as it seems there is a support for
radeon 9200 (RV280 chipset) in radeonfb (at least the sources told me so).
However, after compiling the kernel, radeonfb doesn't seem to detect it and
no matter what I do, it stil uses the plain vga console.

Are there any additional things I have to do to get it to work?
Did anyone else experience any similar problems?

Thanks,
Michael.

You have to pass command line options to the kernel to get the framebuffer to load at boot time. How to do this is usually in: /usr/src/linux/Documentation/fb/???ati.txt

Cheers,

Finegan

Well. I played with it a little today. I know about appending the parameters, and I have done
that. Unfortunately there is no "real" documentation about radeonfb or at least I haven't
found anything.

My problem is:
It doesn't load. If I run modprobe on the radeonfb module, it shows No such device error.
There was also a report telling char-major-226 is missing, but that doesn't seem fatal
to me.

It's probably some stupid thing I'm doing wrong. I think it should be working.
Could someone help me?
Thanks.

Michael.

Have you already compiled in vesa or vga16 into the kernel?

I've only ever messed around with card specific framebuffering once, with a Matrox card, and dual-fbs was kinda nice, but I had to compile out vga16 support, and vesa support, and then compile the matroxfb support into the kernel, not as a module. Then craft the bootloader with the right resoultion as an option. Luckily the documentation existed for my card. Who's name appears if you run /sbin/modinfo on the module? They've gotta have documentation on the web...

Cheers,

Finegan

I haven't tried anything except radeonfb yet. Actually I've never thought about trying anything else as it's the native framebuffer for radeon cards and the sources seem to include the support for my card.

I tried to compile it both into the kernel and as a module. Without any success. I tried the module way in hope to get "some" error or at least some output about what's wrong.

The "No such device" error surprised me quite a bit. I quickly realized I should create the /dev/fb/0 device, when I did, I still keep getting this error.
Are there any special rules for creating this device? Or is there anything else this message can be caused by?

I'm going to try vesafb, and see if it works. If I get the same error I'll know it's probably my stupidity and not the fb.

I really have no idea how to get it to work. Do you have any advice or know where could I get more info about setting up fb in devfs?
Btw I'm running Debian Sid with 2.4.23-pre7

Thanks,
- Michael.

Best bet is not to compile it as a module!
Compile it into the kernel....