ati radeon thinkpad t41 driver question ?
 

All,

The system is a T41 Thinkpad with FC5. The general issue is the radeon video driver does not load. Graphics appear to work so there is some driver loaded. The kernel is 2.6.18.1.

How can it be determined which driver is loaded?

What config determined which driver was loaded?

The first issue is to figure out what is going on and then determine how to load the radeon driver.

What are the config parameters required to build radeon?

Does this driver require a microcode load?

- Thanks Dan

The driver X server is using can be seen from the X configuration file, which is /etc/X11/xorg.conf for Xorg, or if you're using XFree86, it's /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 (or the same without -4 for some older XFrees). So, open up that file and scroll down to the section where screen devices are defined; there's a driver line that holds the driver name. vga is the "basic" driver, but for ATI Radeons the software drivers ati and possibly radeon tend to work too, though they don't provide hardware accelaration. For that you'd need fglrx driver, which can be downloaded from ATI's site (the newest driver there might not work with older cards, so read the release notes before installing) or, more preferably, from some prepackaged binary package source for your distribution.

Installing the driver depends on the driver version and provider, so read the release notes. After the installation your X's config file must be rewritten (the screen/device part), at least the driver name must be changed, and often the driver installer can do this automatically, taking the old configuration as the base of the new one.

So:
1) see the working driver: read /etc/X11/xorg.conf (or XF86Config-4)
2) use Google to determine which driver you need; I don't recommend installing hardware drivers unless they're really needed, since on some configurations that might result in the screen going into power-saving or something, which forces you to use a boot disk to recover the problem etc.
3) if you inted to install the driver, read the README and release notes specific to that driver version - carefully. Make backups if needed, and only then proceed.

If the radeon driver (kernel driver, that is) is not in the kernel, check out if you've got the module available:
If you got it in the above list (modprobe -l), load it:
if it wasn't there, and it isn't in the kernel already (built-in), you need to rebuild your kernel. More information: kernel.org

Thank you,

The issue is the radeon driver situation is not well in hand. There are apparently two drivers, radeon, and radeonfb.

The radeon module was loaded. That one does not apparently have the fix to the power drain during suspend. Also the crt vga out second screen does not appear to work.

After a recompile and some options changes I was able to get radeonfb to load. However it drew even more power on suspend then the radeon driver.

The hope was the the radeonfb driver, kernel 2.6.18.1 would solve this power drain. It apparently does not.

Thanks - Dan

Ok. Too bad it didn't help, but if you have a newer Radeon card, you might want to try installing the fglrx drivers too. I found them problematic myself, trying to get my TV-out work (gamma values jumped sky high, nothing was able to fix them as long as TV was plugged in, and switching TV-out on or off needed a restart every time), but on the other hand without TV the driver worked well. Installing it was a pain, though.

The ATI drivers are not required for pre-9500 (R300) chips, X supports full 3D accelration up to the 9200 (R250).

The radeon driver is for X/DRI, the radeonfb driver is for the console framebuffer (as opposed to vga text mode). They are unrelated.