mennowo

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Hello!

I am running Fedora 11, on a Quad Core Intel PC, with Sapphire ATI HD4850 as a graphic card. Fedora installs like a charm, takes 10 minutes. All works, but desktop effects will not work with the "radeon" driver.

Therefore, I installed the ATI Catalyst driver thatan be downloaded from the ATI webpage. The driver installs by itself and creates a xorg.conf file. However, after reboot, I cannot enter into fedora: before the login screen, X crashes fatally and the system becomes completely non-responsive.

Using interactive startup, I can enter the system by bash/terminal, and tried to replace xorg.conf, making the driver "radeon" again. However, this does nog change the problem: during startup, the screen flickers for about 10 seconds, then a distorted fedora picture is displayed, and stays, and the system does not react to anything but the reset button.

Anyone has any ideas how to get the HD4850 video card fully functional? And maybe to do so without completely reinstalling the system? All ideas very welcome!

Greets, Menno.

mennowo

Small update upon the above post: using a shell script that uninstalls the ati driver, I managed to get back into the login screen, and graphics work again.

However, this means the "fglrx" driver is gone, and I am using "radeon" again. When trying to enable destop effects, I get the message "Desktop effects could not be enabled". When running compiz from a terminal, all window borders disappear and I cannot move around windows anymore. This effect is gone upon reboot, and also when I try to enable Desktop Effects again, from the System menu.

I would really like to resolve these troubles, because I'd like to enable Avant Window Navigator, which I need compiz to be running for...

Any help still welcome, thanks!

Kiboney

Hi

I have the EXACT same problem http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-fglrx-735706/ . Sadly, I still cannot activate fglrx while running into this problem. Only way to stop this for now is to uninstall the ATI driver from init 3.

And no, Compiz cannot be run without fglrx I'm afraid, and same for other 3D applications.

In the meanwhile, what is the rest of your system configuration? Knowing this can help us pinpoint the source of the problem!

We have the same video card - HD 4850;
The same operating system - Fedora 11...

Kernel here is 2.6.29.5, i586
CPU Pentium 4 - 3.2 GHz

Given that info I would think that the problem is directly related Kernel and the HD 4850 graphics card. The graphics on my system worked with the Fedora 10 version.

Cheers

mennowo

Hi, thanks for the reply. I already could not imagine being the only with this problem...

Indeed I think this is related to the kernel, because I succeeded in installing the Catalyst software with "Install Kernel Module" disabled. However, this also means that the problem remains the exact same. I tried installing under two different kernels, no luck:

- 2.6.29.5-191.fc11.x86_64
- 2.6.29.5-1.rt22.1.fc11.ccrma.x86_64.rt (realtime enabled kernel from CCRMA)

Further, I am running a Quad Core 2.66, 4 GB mem, PK5 Asus mobo. In the end I want to be able to use dual head as well.

Kiboney

I posted a bug report on https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=508594

Hopefully it'll be taken into account. You should follow it in case we find a workaround.

EDIT: Woops. They don't support closed-source binary packages.

mkpelletier

I have also had troubles getting this driver to install. I have tried every release of the driver since 9.4, but to no avail. I have heard of some people downgrading their kernel to F10 with success, but I do not want to do this.

Nevertheless, you can get AWN and screenlets to work fine without fglrx and compiz by enabling compositing in Metacity using the gconf gui tool:
Apps > Metacity > General > Compositing_manager=yes

This can be achieved via command line with:

gconftool-2 -s '/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager' --type bool true

I have been using this option since I installed F11. While I still do not have 3D acceleration, my desktop works perfectly well and suspend/resume works flawlessly (this was always an issue with fglrx driver working). Metacity compositing effects are conservative and useful, but lack customization. At least I can use AWN and screenlets, though.

I think I have resolved to wait a year or so for the open source drivers to support my card. AMD released documentation to the open source developers recently so we should see 3d support soon. Some cards already have this with the open sources drivers.

mennowo

The above reply worked well for me! Thanks a lot, I'm happy to be able to use AWN at least, even if desktop effects still won't work. Let us hope indeed the open source drivers will support 3D acceleration in the near future! Thanks again, menno.

chickenlinux

I wish RPMFusion would release a (a)kmod-fglrx so that one could use fglrx with fedora 11... It's the only thing that prevents me from switching from this irritating Ubuntu.