Debian and ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9000 IGP, Wireless Connectivity
 

I must confess...am a newbie to Linux. The Linux(Debian) version is 2.6.7. I am having trouble installing the drivers for my graphics card on my laptop (Compaq R3230). It is ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9000 IGP. I couldnt find the appropriate drivers, so I chose one of the ATI drivers and after install, the X starts but the screen is messed up, then when i reboot I get a nice display but it is not consistent and i tried fooling around with the config file. So I am stuck (now that my XP wiped clean of this new laptop, it is pretty much useless), so I desperately need help.

In addition to above I need help installing Wireless drivers.

I apologise for this request. hey just be nice to me...i am (used to be :-) a windows guy without working machines :-)

HELP

thanks

- ramana

Well, I have a Compaq R3240 that I am currently running Fedora Core 3 Test 3 on. It has an NVIDIA graphics card, so I can't really help you there, but as far as the wirless is concerned, it should use a Broadcom wireless card (at least that is what my laptop uses). If so, you can download ndiswrapper and install your wireless drivers (make sure it is the bcmwl5a.inf file that is on the Compaq driver CD) and it should work fine.

Thanks. I appreciate the help on Wireless drivers.

Heya....

i have a DELL latitude notebook which uses a ATI Mobility radeon Graphics card and it is running debian (unstable) with the stock kernel-2.6.7

Firstly on your pc check if you have the module for the graphics loaded. in bash (the command line) type "lsmod" and you should get something like this:

what you get is not really important, the only real important thing is too see if you have the "radeonfb" module listed (you can see mine in the quote above)

if you havent got it type "modprobe radeonfb" and then configure xserver to use the vesa driver and framebuffer support. then try to start your GUI, hopefully it will work

if it works then add "radeonfb" to your /etc/modules file so that its loaded automatically everytime you turn on the pc. if it doesnt have a fiddle with the Xservers config file (a "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" worked for me)

before i did the above i would have problems ranging from low colour and resolution to it not wanting to start at all/garbled (sometimes white) screen. afterwards it worked and since then ive had no problems. hopefully this will help you too.

P.S: Welcome to linuix! :-)



P.P.S: Oh yeah, if you still have trouble with your laptop a great site to look at is http://www.linux-laptop.net/. here you can find howto's and documentation for installing linux on all sorts of laptops (helped me loads of times)

Good luck!

Thanks ogi, i will try that. i really appreciate it.