But that's NOT supposed to work! (replacing video-card)

Bernard Swiss · 12-03-2007, 08:52 PM

Maybe this belongs in the hardware forum, but here goes...

I'm running Debian (Etch/stable) on a pretty old system (Asus P2B mobo, originally ran Win'98)

My old video-card was dying on me (bad fan), so I picked up a cheap card at a swap-meet.
The old video-card was an ATI Radeon 7200 (32MB)(r100 chipset).
The "new" card is an old ATI Rage 128 (also 32 MB).

I swapped the cards, rebooted, and was completely stonkered to see my system boot straight into Gnome with no apparent problems. .

A quick look at '/etc/X11/xorg.conf' shows what appears to be the old xorg.conf file:
(trimmed a little)

Code:

...

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R100 QD [Radeon 7200]"
        Driver          "ati"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Generic Monitor"
        Option          "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Device          "ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R100 QD [Radeon 7200]"
        Monitor         "Generic Monitor"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           1
                Modes           "1280x1024" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "720x400" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           4
                Modes           "1280x1024" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "720x400" "640x480"

...

 SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24
                Modes           "1280x1024" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "720x400" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier      "Default Layout"
        Screen          "Default Screen"r128
        InputDevice     "Generic Keyboard"
        InputDevice     "Configured Mouse"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
        Mode    0666
EndSectionSection "DRI"

BUT the 'lsmod' listing includes:

Code:

 r128                   34816  2
drm                    61332  3 r128
agpgart                29896  2 drm,intel_agp

Which as far as I can tell means that the Rage 128 driver is the one being loaded... (if any other modules are relavent I didn't recognise them.)

This is the entire lspci listing:

Code:

 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 04)
00:04.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
00:04.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
00:04.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
00:04.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02)
00:09.0 Ethernet controller: D-Link System Inc RTL8139 Ethernet (rev 10)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage 128 RL/VR AGP

I'm guessing that these are the relevent lines from 'dmesg'

Code:

  Boot video device is 0000:01:00.0

Linux agpgart interface v0.101 (c) Dave Jones
agpgart: Detected an Intel 440BX Chipset.
agpgart: AGP aperture is 64M @ 0xe4000000

[drm] Initialized drm 1.0.1 20051102

ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:00.0[A] -> Link [LNKA] -> GSI 11 (level, low) -> IRQ 11
[drm] Initialized r128 2.5.0 20030725 on minor 0
agpgart: Found an AGP 1.0 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 1x mode
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 1x mode

I'm now officially confused! What's going on here? Why haven't I had to run
' dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg ' , or
' xorg -configure '
in order to have a usable desktop (and do I need to run them anyways?) Is all that stuff I read up on about configuring X (XFree86 and Xorg) obsolete? And what are the consequences if I leave it this way?

elliott678 · 12-03-2007, 08:57 PM

X can actually run fine with no xorg.conf in a lot of cases.

Bernard Swiss · 12-03-2007, 09:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by elliott678

X can actually run fine with no xorg.conf in a lot of cases.

I didn't know that.

But in this case, I have an actually erroneous configuration file, which somehow seems to be being ignored, instead of messing things up.

I guess I could try installing some open-GL stuff, or running some flash games or some video files, and see if anything breaks. And I want to try out some alternative desktops/window-managers (KDE, XFCE, fluxbox, etc). I'm wondering if Gnome -- or GDM has been taking over, or if this is something else.

SciYro · 12-03-2007, 09:30 PM

Code:

man ati

Quote:

ati is an Xorg wrapper driver for ATI video cards. It autodetects
whether your hardware has a Radeon, Rage 128, or Mach64 or earlier
class of chipset, and loads the radeon(4x), r128(4x), or atimisc(4x)
driver as appropriate.

so, i see no incorrect config.

Bernard Swiss · 12-03-2007, 10:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SciYro

Code:

man ati

Quote:

ati is an Xorg wrapper driver for ATI video cards. It autodetects
whether your hardware has a Radeon, Rage 128, or Mach64 or earlier
class of chipset, and loads the radeon(4x), r128(4x), or atimisc(4x)
driver as appropriate.

so, i see no incorrect config.

Thank-you, that explains it quite handily. There was reference to ati(4) in the "see also" section of man xorg, but not man xorg.conf, and I didn't realise it was worth a look. I also, now that I'm both awake and clue-ed in, see this under the "chipset" option under the DEVICE SECTION section of man xorg.conf.

Quote:

Chipset "chipset"
This usually optional entry specifies the chipset used on the
graphics board. In most cases this entry is not required because
the drivers will probe the hardware to determine the chipset type.
Don’t specify it unless the driver-specific documentation recom‐
mends that you do.

the_ultimate_samurai · 12-03-2007, 10:50 PM

hmm i recently had a similar experience where i placed an nfs entry into my fstab to load /mnt/hdb1 from my computer to /mnt/nfs2 on the remote computer. but later i removed that folder, and changed the mount point to /mnt/hdb1 but didnt change the entry in the fstab....later the power went out, when it booted up...the file system was mounted at /mnt/hdb1/ i still cant figure out how it knew...