I have an ATI Radeon 9800 pro on Suse 8.2. My monitor is a Sony 20 SEII. I'm running kernel 2.4.20. My mainboard is a Tyan S2468 Thunder K7X with two AMD Athlon XP 2000+ processors. I'm trying to use the fglrx-glc22-4.3.0-2.9.13.i586.rpm driver downloaded from ATI and I use the fglrxconfig utility to build the XF86Config file. Oh yeah, I'm running XFree86 4.3.0.

Here are the problems I've had:

1) If I run X (I use KDE) with the unmodified XF86Config then I get a dark screen.

2) If I set Option "no_dri" to "yes" then I get a "scrambled" screen.

I've searched the net and can find no solution. Can anybody help?

what chipset is on the motherboard?

AMD 760-MPX

BTW: today I removed the video drivers (Rage-128 and Radeon) that I had compiled (NOT as modules) into the kernel. I'd realized that XFree86 maintains its own set of drivers (in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers) and that I probably wouldn't need the kernel drivers. This assumption appears to be correct in the sense that I can boot and get X going without them (with the sax2 generated XF86Config), but I still have problems when I use the FireGL driver (i.e. the XF86Config generated with fglrxconfig). This made me wonder if I have any other kernel settings that are getting in th way. My kernel is fairly customized--I don't use the kernel which shipped with Suse.

i had problems with my screen and i later realized (for some reason) linux was sending the video through my dvi and not to my crt out of my video card.. so now i just use the dvi output.. later i got both of them to work with a change in the XF86Config-4...

OK, I'm game: what change did you make to XF86Config? Also, does/did your configuration (sfw/hdw) match the attributes that I posted? Further, when you said "i had problems with my screen", what were the problems? How did they manifest themselves?

i dont have access to my linux box right now but i'll post the xf86config-4 stuff later.. my screen problems are somewhat unique because i'm using a sun monitor (fixed frequency)... my monitor only sync's at certain resolutions and frequencies.. therefore, when i was testing my X settings.. i was baffled as to why my monitor was turning off.. then i realized.. the video card wasnt outputting on the crt output.. it was only outputting on the DVI output.. i have a dvi-vga adaptor so i hooked it up and voila.. my monitor was workin... now i have linux bootup at 1280x1024 and my monitor works in text only mode! a first for me.. it never worked in DOS or bios.. and no.. i dont have the same chipset as you...

My stuff:
radeon 9500
asus a7v8x-x kt400 8xagp
kernel 2.4.21-0.13mdk xfree 4.3.something

That's interesting. In my case, I know that the card is writing to the monitor ( or at least to the port the monitor is attached to) because I do see something, albeit not what I'd like to see. I suppose that I could try to plug in the other monitor I've got--a Sony 400PS--and see what happens. The problem for me, as with all things Linux is that there's a dearth of info on the web. It seems that the only way to be in the know is to either a) hope that someone somewhere has written about it, b) read the code or c) like it or not, go back to Windoze. Now I dislike Microsoft products as much as the next guy, or at least thier heavy handed approach to business, but I will gve them this: hardware tends to work on Windows, right out of the box.

Sorry for the diatribe, but I've spent some time on the poblem and I haven't gotten very far

hehe..nothing to be sorry about.. i'm goin back to windows too.. a few reasons...

1)my video card has 8 pipelines that ati has disabled.. there is a hacked driver for windows that let all 8 pipelines work.. my games benchmark much better under windows

2)my sound is f-ed up linux.. maybe i could get it working right.. who knows.. but i got fed up after spending a week to get my vid card to work and then realized it works almost twice as fast under xp...

3)quicktime movies under linux? maybe

4)sony minidisc player

5)ghost recon doesnt play under linux..

6)prolly some other reasons but i'm tired