Debian: Get Full Gnome Working Again
 

Hi. I was running Gnome Wheezy for several months, running full (non-classic) Gnome, with my Radeon HD 4350, and this was working great. Recently, my hard drive crashed and I had to reinstall Wheezy (7.2.0). Now, I can seem to figure out how to get acceleration back. I installed the firmware-linux-nonfree package, which is all I remember doing previously to get this to work with the opensource drivers. What is it I'm forgetting?

I don't care about 3D games or such like, but Gnome Classic really sucks compared to full Gnome.

You may have to go with the proprietary driver.

In the case of your card it would be the "legacy" driver as cards older than the 5000 series are not supported by ATI anymore.

I have to admit to a little surprise that the FOSS drivers don't work. Maybe someone else has a suggestion because I have, since Squeeze, gotten much better results with the free drivers. I had a 2000 series card. Now have a 6000 series so maybe the free drivers just don't cut it with the older cards anymore.

Really hope someone has a better suggestion.

Installing firmware-linux package (which is just a metapackage for firmware-linux-{free,nonfree}) was all i needed to do to get gnome-shell, with Radeon HD2400. Plus a reboot, of course.

Perhaps check your login manager, do you actually login to gnome-shell, and not gnome-fallback/anything else?

I'm running the same video device: Radeon HD 4350/4550 and using the FOSS radeon driver. No problems whatsoever with video acceleration. I'm running Debian Jessie.
jdk

I removed the firmware-linux-nonfree with

apt-get remove firmware-linux-nonfree

and then reinstalled with

apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree

did a reboot, and gnome-shell seems to be working fine now. Not sure what was wrong earlier. Maybe I had screwed up the initrd image somehow and rebuilding it fixed it. But I'm happy it's working, in any case!

And what driver did you end up using?
jdk

The open source drivers. (With the non-free firmware.)

Yes, as I've said, "radeon" is what I use. What makes you think you need the non-free firmware for your video card? I do need it for my Wifi dongle but not for video.
jdk

When I used to build my own initrd and kernel (under Gentoo, and using the exact same graphics card), the acceleration simply would not work unless I had included the non-free binary firmware blob in the kernel build. I remember this pretty well because at the time I wanted to use the libre-kernel and have a completely libre system. (I still would, but I can't afford to buy a new graphics card.)

You say you aren't using the firmware blob, and you have full hardware acceleration? I would be interested in knowing more, but I'm thinking we have some miscommunication here.

The nonfree firmware is not fglrx friver, it is the binary-blob part of opensource drivers. Debian splits it.

Ok, I looked at the filelist of the firmware-linux-nonfree package and it does indeed contain RV710 stuff. You learn something everyday.
Thanks,
jdk

Yes the firmware-linux-nonfree package has some drivers that do not meet the FSF definition of free for one reason or another. They come with the kernel and Debian splits them off for users that want a "pure" FOSS install.

Up until Debian 7 I had to have that installed to get to a desktop. Never did quite figure out which one I needed. Probably should while I still have an install of Squeeze on here. Don't need it at all on the newer versions.