Patching the ATI driver
 

Hello,
I'm trying to get 3D enabled on my X850XT and can't seem to fix something I may have messed up. When my computer boots, in either root or my other account, it boots fine with ATI Radeon drivers. Everything seems fine. But if I logoff and kill X then I lose my drivers and my screen shuts off. Any idea

FYI Sometimes my PC won't shutdown all the way, it shuts X down, but doesn't seem to shut it down any farther. And to make it worse, sometimes it won't boot in X on my other account(the non root account).

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_X850XT_ATI_Drivers
Install driver version 8.23.7

Which distro is this?

I am using Slackware if that is what you are asking.

That's what I mean all right.

My prev. advise, IIRC, was off a suggestion that the radeon driver was iffy with your card type. Rereading: - you mean to say, you lose all video output -- you don't get a terminal login prompt?

I take it this is solved by a reboot?
I take it you can kill X OK while you are logged in?
Does it do this with the vesa driver?

(a) video output alone has stopped - try going through the login process anyway: type blind. Pay attention to HDD activity.

(b) there is no login shell ... something got buntered. Sounds like a config file missing or rewritten. See if anything got in any of the syslogs. What is it that you think you messed up?

Say I start my system. I have two accounts, the with root access and the one without it. When I log on using the non root account I can access the PC and start using Slackware, that is until I start X. If I type startx then I lose everything. But if I log on to my root account and type startx everything starts up fine. But when I go to shutdown it does not sound like the computer is running but the power supply is obviously on. Now the only thing I just thought of is I was messing around with my power scaling stuff and never really finished that up because of the problems that began. Could that have messed something up? And yes if I logoff while I'm using X i lose everything to my monitor. I don't even have a shell command. I would rather not reinstall Slackware but I think it would probably be the fastest way to fix this....hopefully it doesn't come to that..

Reinstall probably - unless you can return your scaling to defaults. Your symptoms are starting to sound like acpi config. Again - syslogs. Look through the old ones as well as dmesg.

I reinstalled and retried and I still have the same result. Can't shut off...

Have you looked through your logs?

Do you still have the problems you reported as a non-root user?

yes. I have it all the time. It does the same thing in all the user accounts.

You have a brand new install?
Previous install didn't manifest this behavior until you started fiddling with frequency scaling?

Then, the problem files exist as that part of the installation that remains unchanged. You can hunt it down, or reinstall with more changed. (Backup your files and see if it still happens on a default distro install.)

If option 1:
Try the ATI proprietary driver. (If works, then problem with radeon driver.)
Study your logs for offending messages. (In any case.)

I suspect your shut-down and video issues are different. The video issue has the hallmarks of a permissions fubar. Shut-down looks like ACPI.

What vga options are you using in the kernel command line(etc/lilo.conf)?

Well. When I brought up etc/lilo.conf, it was blank. Nothing was there at all. That might be an issue. Also, to clear things up, when I did the new install, I did not do anything with the power scaling. The only change I made was the ATI drivers. I wanted to isolate that problem and see if that was it.

OK, but did you preserve any data, like your home partition?

Have you checked the syslogs?
Have you checked power-now?

I'm guessing this is slackware... IIRC, slackware still uses lilo and puts lilo.conf in the default location (/etc/lilo.conf) so this is interesting, yes.

For lilo to work you must be have a lilo.conf ... unless you are using a different bootloader.

locate lilo.conf

(grub.conf or menu.lst would be in /boot/grub/)

Are you using the radeon driver ore the proprietary ati drivers? Did you read those gentoo notes?

Alright. I looked for grub.conf and menu.lst in /boot/grub/ and found nothing. About looking at my syslogs I cannot seem to bring them up. So I must be doing something wrong here. Also I am sorry for being quite acknowledgeable when it comes to some aspects of Slackware and Linux in general. I am quite new and am trying to learn.

How are you trying to bring them up?... "un-knowledgeable", possibly. No worries...

Slackware has quite a steap learning curve compared with other distributions. However, once mastered, gives a strong insight into how linux works.

So lets make sure that what you're reporting is real and not just down to inexperience. Try similar strategies to the ones below:

syslogs:
The most recent log, /var/log/syslog, is produced by the dmesg command. Otherwise:

less /var/log/syslog.0
... which is the one most likely to have errors from the last boot. However, dmesg is worth it, the problems may have produced errors when the driver first runs.

finding bootloader configuration files:
... this is for my system. I have neither lilo.conf nor grub.conf, but menu.lst is found. It is a puzzle you can boot at all with what you are reporting.

xorg.conf driver:
less /etc/X11/xorg.conf

...snip...
Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Corporation 82865G Integrated Graphics Controller
"
Driver "i810"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"

Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "RenderAccel" "True"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "True"
Option "backingstore" "True"
Option "TripleBuffer" "True"
EndSection
...snip...
[/code]

But it is looking through the syslogs that will be tedious.
Have you read the gentoo notes?