Hi ,

I finally managed to install Debian Etch on my machine, dual booting to WinXP Pro. P965 motherboard ( solved the JMicron problem by using the daily netinst cd, installing only the basic system, apt-cdrom add the first 2 CD's of the weekly builds, and installing X with GNOME.), ATI X1900GT at PCIe, 2 GB of RAM, 250 GB HD, 19" Samsung 960BF TFT-LCD, wireless Logitech mouse and keyboard.

Managed to startx by using "vga" driver on my X1900GT, got gnome working at 320x200 resolution.

Downloaded ati fglrx driver ver. 8.33.6 from ati site. Installed it using the .run installer.

Now, when I try to startx, my screen goes blank, and ctrl-alt-bkspc won't work, I have to hard reset the system.

At the end of the the log file (I can't remember the name, may be Xorg.0.log), it says that dependency libstdc++.so.5 is not there. I managed to figure out that fglrx needs GCC 3.3.5 after some googling. I have GCC 4.0 and GCC 4.1. So I have libstdc++.so.6. Does installing GCC 3.3.5 mean downgrading? As I read somewhere it is not possible to downgrade Debian.

How can I solve this problem?

modprobe fglrx says that the module is loaded, fglrxinfo says no screen services or something similar. (I'm at work now so I can't really write the exact messages and such). fglrxconfig -> no such command.

I read that compiling the source instead of using ati's installer will solve the problem, but I don't know how to compile under linux.

Anything will be helpful, thank you.

I think that I would first try creating a link called libstdc++.so.5 that points to libstdc++.so.6. I would make it a soft link so that you can tell the difference between the original and the one that you created.

Log on as root, then enter the following commands.
If it doesn't work then you can always delete the soft link.

Alternatively you could use the apt-cache (I think) utility to see what packages provide the file that you want. If it is only supplied in GCC 3.3.5 you could always install that alongside the newer version that you've got. That could overwrite files that you have in directories like /usr/lib that are shared by both versions of GCC so it might cause trouble.

You should have used the drivers from Debian's repos. Here's a howto I wrote a while back. The only thing that has changed is references to Sid. Everything is in Etch now.

Thank you very much. I've solved it put installaing libstdc++5 and GCC3.3 packages. GDM didn't start. Examined xorg.0.log. It said that this fglrx driver doesn't support 8 bit color depth. Edited xorg.conf to change default bit depth to 24, and there GNOME was in front of me