Struggling with KDE 4.1 and ATI Radeon 200 video
 

Greetings,

Am trying to rebuild a Windows XP MCE box in Linux for a friend, and it has the unlovely ATI Radeon 200 video card. <sigh>
CPU is intel 524, and we have tried both 32 and 64 bit variants of 4.1

What happens:

Sabayon DVD boots cleanly, boot menu options appear, but with or without music, etc, low graphics or text mode followed by 'startx' we then get an error message from the Dell CRT Monitor that the "frequency is out of range". Repeats with both 32 and 64 bit flavours of Sabayon.

Trying to overclock the monitor, maybe? <grin>

Clearly something in the configuration is trying to run the monitor too hard - is there a sane way of manipulating (say) xorg.conf to suit the ATI card?

To add insult to injury, Ubuntu 9.04 just works. Will not do 3D, but it does work live, or installed to HD. Could use that, I' m used to it, but really wanted to give Sabayon a try (used to enjoy 3.4e/f until I munged it).

Any suggestions, folks?

Ben

there are several things you can do to modify your xorg at boot, outlined in our wiki under cheatcodes - take a look here:

http://wiki.sabayonlinux.org/index.p...ps#Cheat_Codes

these cheat codes allow you to modify your refresh rate, resolution, and opengl provider at DVD boot.

~xlnagla

Thanks! But....
 

Thank you, xlnagla, that was a good call, and we have tried it out, with a few variations.

Should have worked, but exactly the same thing happened. :confused:

It may be that recent kernels are struggling with the ATI 200 integrated graphics - Ubuntu 904 runs using Xvesa, but Xorg dies the death. Ubu804 works fine with both.

It seems that ATI may have removed the 200 from their latest driver, and this causes a problem with recent kernels.

Have installed MythBuntu 8.04 since I can make the old ATI driver run, and we were pressed for time. Will be living out of a suitcase for some days now, home next week.

Thank you for your help! Would still like to get a Sabayon install running, and will try my own Sempron/nVidia box which has space on the 2nd HD.

This often confuses GRUB, but am learning to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst so that extra distros boot happily. An ancient P3 laptop boasts 9 distros now, makes for some interesting comparisons.

Need to finish off the Myth TV config for my friend first.... I may be at it a while!

All the best, Ben