I read your full posts (2)...with a Rhum&coke ;-)

Does your setup work with the open source radeon driver? Did you try. The new driver I mean. The one that does 3D. (Althought with a performance lost in games).

What makes me wonder from all you wrote is the small part when you restore a working xorg.conf and get no gui after rebooting. That makes me think something is off besides graphics.

you seem to be willing to work hard to fix this so, if I may suggest something I tried in the past for diagnostic purposes. Download and install ubuntu 8.10 or Mepis, or any other very popular live-cd install distro and try installing it. Just the CD versions, not the DVD.

Then try to install them with open drivers first, just to see everything works. After you can install fglrx and fiddle with it.

That will take Opensuse out of the equation and concentrate on the hardware problem.

I don't know much about the open-source radeon driver. Is it different from the one pre-installed then? I'll certainly give that a shot.

I have previously tried Ubuntu 9.04 which installs fine, apart from choosing 62Hz as vertical sync which looks gammy, I have to manually set it to 60 or 75 and it looks perfect. Ubuntu 9.04 then offers to install fglrx for me, at which point, guess what? out-of-range.

Haven't tried Mepis, althought I think it's on the cover DVD of Linux Format from a couple of months ago, so I'll look that out. If not I'll download it, only takes a couple of hours to download.

What's interesting about the xorg.conf thing, is that everything can be fixed with old xorg.confs until I run amdcccle, then something changes. I think it alters more than just xorg.conf, and I wish I knew what that is, because I think that would crack this problem.

I'm mainly willing to work hard to fix this because I moved from Windows to Linux for main desktop stuff about 3 years ago now, but I stick with Windows just for games. I hold out hope that one day I might be able to ditch Windows completely. I am still very open minded though, I have Windows7 RC installed on the same machine that we have been troubleshooting, and it works very well. I'm quite impressed with Win7 so far to be honest, although it'll still have to work very hard to supplant linux as my main desktop

Your xorg.conf_3.txt appears to be a bit odd.

Earlier comments about you can't have two of each section were not quite accurate. If you look at the bottom of your xorg.conf_3.txt you see:

This is what I think tells X what to use. So the extra items (monitor and graphics) are ignored. In this case you are telling it to use Screen[0]. You look for Section "Screen" for Identifier "Screen[0]" and it tells it to use Device "Device[0]". And under Section "Device" you look for Identifier "Device[0]" and you see it is using fglrx.

Still I think it is cleaner to not have the extra stuff so it is better its not there.

I am not using suse or yast or sax so you'll have to filter my comments. When I install fglrx, I simply run the ati installer ati*run with X not running. When this loads it puts files (in my system) in the /lib/modules/fglrx area as well as in /usr/share/ati (log and uninstaller). It also loads up some of its own libG... files (possibly overwriting mesa and libdrm, I'm not sure).

fgrlx does not need the kernel libdrm or radeon and you should probably rename those so they don't load (in your /lib/modules/your kernel/drivers/char/drm).

When your system boots, it should load the fglrx module. Do you see that with lsmod?

Once flgrx was loaded, even if I rmmod it, the radeon drivers would not work very well. I would rename the fglrx.ko in the /lib/modules/your kernel/drivers/char/drm (or something like that - look around) to fglrx.ko.org. Then reboot. You also need to change xorg.conf for radeon(hd).

I keep three xorg.conf files (xorg.conf.fglrx, xorg.conf.radeon, and xorg.conf.radeonhd). Then for whichever one I want to use I copy it to xorg.conf. Simple.

the AMD website recommends catalyst 9-6 for the hd2600 so it doesn't look like they dropped support but you may need to read the changes file to verify.

If you decide to try the open source drivers, you need to uninstall fglrx. Go to /usr/share/ati and run the uninstaller. This should restore the original files before fglrx (catalyst really) was loaded.

It sounds like your X version is adjusting your xorg.conf upon every close.

I wonder if your mboard might be old enough that the newer udev stuff doesn't work with it.

In any event here are two xorg.conf for my system.

Hopefully, this time with attachments once I realized they have to end in .txt

edit: oh, and your busid will probably be different. I never used to add this and it doesn't seem to matter so you should just delete that line.

Also, you'll notice I don't have any subsection modes. I don't think these work and I would just go with the 24 lines.

In the event your are using the horizontal and vertical refresh numbers, I would try without them. I don't need them.

If you still have troubles, it might be more of a hardware related issue and you should post at phoronix where the amd reps sometimes help.

By the way, I have integrated hd3200 (780g).

Attached Files

	xorg.conf.fglrx.txt (1.7 KB, 19 views)
	xorg.conf.radeonhd.txt (1.9 KB, 17 views)

Thanks for that forum1793. I don't have as much time this week as I had last week, but I'm researching how to install the radeonhd driver when I can. Failing that I'll take your advice and post this information on the phoronix forums and see if any ATi-heads there have any ideas.

I have finally managed to install and use the ATi drivers on my ATi card. The quick answer is:
I used a DVI cable with a DVI monitor.

The long answer is:

My original setup:
Biostar iDEQ ultra-small, AGP ATi HD2600Pro, AMD Sempron 2.8GHz, 1GB RAM, 500GB SATA HD, 15" flat panel monitor (VGA input only).
This video card only has 2xDVI outputs, no VGA. It was connected to the monitor with a DVI->VGA adapter. Recently I got the (limited) money to replace this system with:
Gigabyte GA-M720-US3, PCI-E ATi HD4670, AMD Athlon X2 64, 4GB RAM, 500GB SATA HD, 19"Wide HannsG monitor.
This time both monitor and video card have VGA and DVI connectors, so no adapters needed. I had no DVI cable to hand though, so I used a VGA cable temporarily and - guess what? - OUT-OF-RANGE after I installed ATi drivers. I got a DVI cable just to test it and it worked perfectly when first installed, no messing.

So, in the name of experimentation, I set the old system back up again with the new monitor and booted it with first DVI, then AGP leads connected. DVI was fine, AGP was OUT-OF-RANGE.

I also found that although my new setup worked with DVI as soon as ATi drivers were installed (via the SUSE repositories), they only worked until I changed the resolution. Either using AMDCCCLE or SaX2 to change the resolution worked fine nomatter how many times I logged in or out, but as soon as the system was rebooted X failed to start again. I then installed SuSE again and put in the drivers from the AMD site(via the run script) and it worked beautifully - and still works. The only downside now is I have to recompile/install them every time the kernel is updated, but I can live with that.

So, it's not really a fix as there must be some sort of bug in ATi's drivers, but in the meantime I will consider this one solved. Thanks to all who took the time to help me with this one!

As you, once my resolution is set I don't need to change it, but It woul bug the hell out of me that my O.S is unable to support me having to do it.

So this is 80% solved. Let's keep it in the back of our minds for now.

DVI is so much better quality wise so in a sense this is a good thing for you.

A word of advice though. Don't update at every Kernel release. New does not mean better. It brings new problems sometimes

Glad this worked for you.

I haven't seen this problem with rebooting. I've read about it here and I think at phoronix once. All three of these were with suse and sax.

Adding to new kernel is fairly easy provided kernel is compiled with msi support under bus options. You can just go to /lib/modules/fglrx. Then run sh build_mod/make.sh and sh make_install.sh.

But I concur you should not really be upgrading kernel that much once you have something working. Those that do are typically not enabling the new additions anyway.