amd driver installation help
 

Debian wheezy user looking for some help getting my amd drivers to work correctly.

Downloaded the latest driver from amd (13.4) and did an automatic install of them. Everything seemed fine but when I try to run amdcccle or amdconfig I get the following:

So I completely removed/purged amd drivers, xorg.conf & fglrx. Then tried to install with a distro specific package. Doing so gives me the following:

why not add contrib and nonfree repositories and install Fglrx using synaptic

Not sure if fglrx comes with catalyst control center. Which I need due to having multiple monitors, or do I? That being said how would I go about adding those?

There is the debian 'how to install the AMD proprietary display driver (AMD Catalyst, aka fglrx) on Debian systems' page-

https://wiki.debian.org/ATIProprietary

I think that the control center is installed with that method, if its not its a simple 'apt-get install fglrx-control' away.

That link worked like a charm, guess that's what I get for trying to do something outside the repo's :D. Still running into issue having it recognize my 2nd video card and getting the black bar to move to the appropriate screen.

2nd video card, are you running crossfire?

Nope, one 5870 & one 5450. Three monitors hooked up to the first, two hooked up to the second. Only the three monitors on the 5870 are showing anything, the other two aren't displaying anything.

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What is in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. This here may help in setting up your xorg.conf file.
http://ubuntugeeknerd.blogspot.com/2...ics-cards.html

Well, catalyst seems to be opening up great. I now have 2 not 3 monitors working on a constant basis, the third comes and goes as it pleases. Every time I try and configure my monitors it throws out a random error, and when I say random, I mean random. Every time its different. Here's a copy of my xorg.conf

that's a pretty common error I receive when trying to enable the third monitor.

Try-

aticonfig --adapter=all --initial

If that doesnt work, its going to be fun, fun, fun trying to find an example xorg.conf file.......

There isn't anything fun about this......

I absolutely hate saying this but in windows this would never happen. I understand Linux is 10x more work to get the same thing as windows. The outcome is fat greater or is it? I'm starting to wonder if converting was worth it.

Hi,
Then why say it? ATI writes full featured drivers for MS Windows, does a half arsed job writing drivers for Linux and doesn't release specs so that others can write better drivers. What exactly do you expect?

Evo2.

Its not really 10 times the work, in most cases.

Running 2 x video cards and 5 monitors is very non standard, which makes finding info and example xorg.conf files a lot harder.

It's just a very aggravating situation, trying several distro's and multiple methods of driver install and not have a single one work. Spent well over a month here and there trying to get this going. Anyway is there anything in my xorg.conf t that gives anyone some ideas?

You only have three monitor sections and 3 screen sections in your xorg.conf. Maybe adding additional more sections for the monitors not showing up will help.

I'm still really new so I hope this doesn't sound dumb. What's the difference between a screen and a monitor. I'm assuming a screen is virtual screen space while a monitor is the actual hardware.

This tells what each section is for.
http://www.x.org/archive/X11R6.8.0/doc/xorg.conf.5.html

Sorry to piggyback, but I'm experiencing graphics issues with Jessie/Sid. The fglrx doesn't exist in the Jessie repo and it won't install from Sid. The .run from AMD fails to build the kernel modules. I have both free and non-free Linux headers along with build-essential. I also have i386 enabled. Are the drivers just broken in testing and unstable?

Alright looking over my xorg.conf it looks as though only one card is listed and three monitors. My second card doesn't seem to be showing up at all. lspci list it in there however.....

In your xorg.conf I see 4 monitor sections, three device sections with the same card and three screen sections. I think it should be five different monitor sections, two different device sections and five screen sections to tie the monitors to the devices. I believe dmesg will give you the information to setup the second video device.

As far as I know, your right colorpurple21859.

You could try having a look at this page-

http://www.v13.gr/blog/?p=94

Adding extra 'Device' and 'Monitor' sections to xorg.conf should work with your setup, if you change 'radeon' to 'fglrx'.

Many thanks to all involved with this post because it enabled me to get my single screen working!!!!!

Much appreciated.

Attachment 13667

Attachment 13668


Also I didn't seem to have a blacklist.conf file. I know that in fedora this is needed to install amd drivers, so I went ahead
and made one, and blacklisted radeon & radeonhd. Not really sure if it was necessary or not. What is dmesg?

Something worth mentioning, I'm running off of the main card hdmi, dvi & dp (with an active adapter)
This setup for running 3 monitors has worked under ubuntu, fedora & windows so my adapter or card aren't an issue.
If I have all three ports plugged in the hdmi and dp work. However if I disconnect either one of them when all three ports are filled the dvi monitor will start to work as well as whatever other monitor I have plugged in. Just not all three at the same time it seems.

On the 2nd picture I have attached I'm noticing that there's 3 device sections, an overall listing of the ports on my primary card and/or connected monitors. I thought the device section was just supposed to be for the card itself. If that was the case wouldn't I only have one device section. I'm obviously negating a 2nd section for my second gfx card as that is a can of beans I have yet to open.

Alright I guess I've been somewhat timid about touching my xorg.conf. At this point I realized things can't get any worse so I started tearing into it. I've weened out a bunch of useless code. Right now this is how she sits.

Attachment 13670

My fifth monitor is on the floor, I have a heavy duty steal wall mount being made right now, which should be put together next week sometime.

Here's my current "working" xorg.conf


I tried to modify the identifier & device of the first listed....gave me a ttyl prompt. I copied over the name of the later devices so it went from:

Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0"
Device "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"

to

Identifier "amdcccle-Screen[1]-0"
Device "amdcccle-Device[1]-0"

My sole focus at the moment is getting my far most right screen working, then the additional card and monitors will be next.


Attachment 13671

I found a working 5 monitor setup and the xorg.conf to go with it

Attachment 13672

It would be super helpful if I could find a way to reboot X. Rebooting the whole system is somewhat of a pain. ctrl+alt+backspace doesn't work in my case. ctrl+alt+f1 does however bring up the appropriate full screen prompt, but I cant get gdm3 (gnome display manager) to quit with:

/etc/init.d/gdm3 stop


gives me an error.

How did you generate/create that xorg.conf file?

If you are using GDM with debian, the correct comamnd (as 'root') should be-

invoke-rc.d gdm3 stop

https://wiki.debian.org/GDM

Awesome! That command worked perfectly for start/stopping gdm3.
I believe that I used:

to generate my xorg.conf

current xorg.conf as it sits, still dazed and confused about getting this third monitor working.............I've already lost countless hours of sleep, and god knows how much money on this thing. Every day that passes I'm getting hammered by this shit not working. I'm done for the day. Hopefully some good news may come when I wake.

I think your doing things the hard way. I'd be trying to get the 2nd card fully detected and working before trying to setup more monitors. Leave things like rotation and disable power mangement out until you've got a better handle on it all.

I'd start off by fixing your "Device" section....you've got 3 devices listed, 3 different 'amdcccle-Device' and all the bus IDs are PCI:1:0:0 (one card should be a different busID, you can find it with 'lspci').

Looking at your /var/log/Xorg.0.log (etc) might be helpful as well.

*edit- did you try (as root) aticonfig --adapter=all --initial

Alright I ran the above mentioned code:
First time around nothing, after running it a few times and a few restarts it started working. Can't really do anything at the moment due to having the duplicate date/time & user name on the black bar.


Attachment 13679

My primary is getting progressively smaller after each reboot.


This is how she sits as of now.

Attachment 13680


Oddly enough I have no 5th monitor, device and/or screen in my xorg.conf

So I've made a slight error in judgment. A few restarts later I realized I no longer have a primary display. It's completely disappeared, only left with an:

Oops something wrong happened.

The last time my primary display was usable it looked like:

Attachment 13684

Sceenshots arent going to help much.

Posting your current xorg.conf is a better idea.

Thats going to be tricky... I can't open anything currently.

Attachment 13685
Attachment 13686
Attachment 13687

Attachment 13688
Attachment 13689
Attachment 13690

Attachment 13691


Where there's a will there's a way I suppose, sorry for the quality. The last one is a quasi duplicate.

Wow, you're got more patience than I do Ac1d. Nice persistence :)

Seems to be the same xorg.conf as before running aticonfig -adapter=all --initial.

I've got this feeling that either the xorg.conf isnt being used by the driver (yes, that can happen). I dont know about forcing it with that xorg.conf either, it just seems wrong in places.

Maybe try deleting the xorg.conf, and/or running aticonfig -adapter=all --initial again.

I really should dig around a bit more.....I have this idea that just like you can run nVidia-settings (the nvidia control panel) as 'root' then save an xorg.conf from there you can also do that with the catalyst control center....I'll have to wait a few hours at least as the only system with an AMD/ATI card here is currently being used by my housemate.

If that fails, or doesnt work, I can try to write up a bit better xorg.conf file.

What's really odd is that the 5th monitor is working just fine. Yet it's not even listed in the device, monitor, or screen section. I will admit that it's running in clone mode so I'm not really sure if that counts.

Guess I really don't have a choice on the patience part. I refuse to use windows anymore for my primary computer. It does suck not being able to focus on what I'm supposed to be doing at the moment. If I don't sit down and take the time to learn this, it's never going to happen.

Interesting, just removed my xorg.conf. thought I would have a look afterwards....


Attachment 13705

All those xorg files.....

Now i can't even run aticonfig -adapter=all --initial. Thinking it's time for a reinstall.

Attachment 13720

After a reinstall, installing fglrx & running aticonfig --adapter=all --initial

In back where I started, but this time around I'm not using my restart button until this issue is solved.

Current xorg.conf, primary card is cloning 3 monitors, secondary is cloning 2 (different desktops between main and secondary cards)