Problems installing ATI HD 4670 AGP Graphics card
 

This has been driving me bananas for 3 days now. I have trawled through a variety of how2's, tutorials and guides but to no avail.

I am running Debian (Testing) with the XFCE & MATE desktops and have been using an nVidia GT6200 AGP graphics card for some time. I recently decided to upgrade and purchased an ATI HD 2670 AGP iceq card, but I'm having no luck getting it to work.

I removed all of the nVidia files and fglrx files from previous attempts so that there should be no clashes. Now I boot into a command prompt, however when I attempt to install the ATI driver all I am left with is a blank screen on boot up, I can't do anything except restart the computer, ctrl+alt+F1 gives no response :( Everything appears to install as it should, but each time I get the same outcome. I have used both guides available here (using the repos and manual).

It may be worth noting that for the manual method I am not able to convert the ati-driver-installer-11-12-x86.x86_64.run file into debs (it provides quite a few errors):

However I have just run it using sh ./ati-driver-installer-11-12-x86.x86_64.run this appears to work and gives no error messages in the build log.

I am out of ideas, so I am now pleading for the help of somebody with experience in this area.

Have you runas root after the install? This will generate an initial xorg.conf for the AMD driver.

Hello kmacphail

I have some experience with ATI on Debian(squeeze and wheeze), but worst I had Hybrid cards, I tried a lot of tutorials but none could solve. Than I installed ubuntu, and it comes ready working properly. If this computer is the your personal one I recommend you to choose for Ubuntu, or another high level distribution like Mint. Debian is better for server and computers that you do not use in a lot of applications.

Another way you could choose is to install the free drivers that are available on the repository's.

apt-get purge install linux-headers-(uname -r) fglrx-control fglrx-driver
apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati

Atenciously

I totally disagree. Debian is a nice system for the use on a desktop PC. I used it quite some time before I changed to Slackware. And saying that is not good if you use a lot of applications is in my somewhat strange, it has a repository with over 30.000 packages, and none of those I used (and from time to time I really had a lot software installed) failed on me.

To the OP: I had a short look on AMD's website, and it seems that they have a different driver for their cards with AGP interface, but I couldn't find a Linux version of it. So it may be that you have to stick with the free radeon-drivers.

Did you boot with the "nomodeset" kernel option and also blacklist the radeon kernel module?

Adam

Thanks for the responses, I'll answer these one at a time:

TobiSGD:
Yes I ran that after installing the driver and I agree that Debian is very nice as a Desktop distro

jeanCarloMachado:
I have no intention of using Ubuntu, I like my Debian setup the way it is and I feel that re-installing a totally new system is a bit much, I hopefully will find a work around (plus I hate unity with a passion, that was my worst desktop experience ever). I have tried the drivers in the repos, but these all lead to the same result: a blank screen :(

adamk75:
I set the kernel to boot with the "nomodeset" option in GRUB, but I hadn't tried blacklisting the radeon and radeonhd drivers, I did that but sadly the outcome was the same :'(

At what point does the screen go blank?

Adam

adamk75

As soon as it starts to load X. Nothing works then: I can't get to a prompt using ctrl+alt+F1 the hard light drive stops flashing, it just behaves like it is completely frozen. I found this on the Arch ATI wiki:

But it didn't make a difference

I really should have included this before: here is the X log:

Have you confirmed a complete system pickup by trying to log in from another machine via ssh? Can you boot into Debian without starting X and pastebin the output od 'dmesg'? Finally, does your BIOS have any 'safe' AGP options?

adamk75

The AGP settings in my BIOS are as follows:

AGP Data Rate: 8X
AGP Aperture Size: 512MB
AGP Fast Write: Disabled
AGP SideBand Address: Enabled
Primary Graphics Adapter: AGP

AGP Voltage: Auto

Does the card work fine with the open source driver? Are you able to boot up to a usable desktop with a liveCD?

Unless you want to play some 3d games, I would stick with the open-source driver. The open-source driver is actually pretty good except when it comes to games.

Ion Silverbolt:

Yes I can boot into liveCD environments and have installed a distro beside mine that does give me an X environment. However the reason I bought this card was to play 3D games, my old one just couldn't cut the mustard and eventually I pushed it too hard and it gave up the ghost.

---------- Post added 18-01-12 at 10:10 PM ----------

Adamk75

Here's the link for the dmesg log

You could try passing 'noapic nolapic' and even 'acpi=0' to the kernel to see if that makes a difference.

Adamk75

Thanks for the response, but I am still having no joy, odd thing is that now when I boot up and the screen goes black the Xorg.0.log file is empty. This is really annoying, I would give up but I am too broke not to have this work, I can't afford to splash out on another card (nor do I want to)