I had a problem with my ATI Radeon AIW 9000 when using the livna ati-fglrx driver. I am running Linux kernel 2.6.12-1.1420_FC4 with X.org 6.8.2.

After installing the fglrx drivers, X.org was almost unusable due to an increase in brightness and decrease in contrast. Light colors faded to white. No amount of correction on the monitor could compensate. I was using the TV-Out in clone mode which did not display the same symptoms: I had to use my TV until I fixed the problem.

The solution was to disable HWcursor:

Option "SWcursor" "on"
Option "HWcursor" "off"

Now my screen is completely normal, but the SWcursor is driving me nuts. When scrolling in any application using the mouse wheel, the cursor leaves a trail obliterating anything else on screen. I am too addicted to my wheel mouse to let this go, but the display is unusable with HWcursor.

Can anyone help?

Eric

I can confirm the same behaviour on a 9200SE. I just went from Fedora Core3 to Fedora Core4 and saw the same washed out screen when using the fglrx driver. Not sure whether it was FC3->FC4 that did it, but never saw it before. I normally use Xinerama, so I don't use the fglrx driver very often (I switch to it for TV-out, but see below for that problem). As described, after changing SWcursor to "yes" and HWcursor to "no" the colors on the screen went back to normal.

One added observation, when I run fgl_glxgears (Direct Rendering=yes), The image appears too dark with SWcursor set to "yes". There should be images of gears on the surface of the box, but all I see are black faces. With HWcursor set to yes, I see the gears.....albeit very washed out from the over contrast.

My frustration with the latest fglrx package is that I can't set the TV-out to the primary dac and still use my CRT computer monitor. Not having TV-out on the primary DAC means that Xvideo doesn't show on the TV screen (Xvideo only shows on primary DAC). So far the only way I have found to watch a movie on my TV is to disable the CRT completely and have the TV-out as the only working output...then the TV-out is on the Primary DAC and Xvideo works on the TV. They used to have a "MonitorLayout" option that I had set to STV,CRT and that worked great. The latest fglrx removed that option and added "ForceMonitors" and "DesktopSetup".

Needless to say, the good people at ATI are still half heartedly supporting Linux....

Another observation. If I turn off the TV-out with

Option ForceMonitors "notv"

Then I can delete the HWcursor/SWcursor settings from the xorg.conf file and the colors are correct. So it looks like the contrast issue has to do with the card trying to drive the TV-out and overdriving the CRT. Sill have a "dark" output on fgl_glxgears, so all is not perfect......

Same behaviour on a 9200SE (with ubuntu breezy)

the trick with swcursor works ! but gave me a lot of artefacts with the mouse pointer ;-( ...

is anybody have found a better way ? or a solution ?