Hi, I just installed Gentoo, and just for kicks this time I decided to try the official ati-drivers for my Radeon 9500 pro Graphics card (as opposed to the generic Xfree ones). As I'm sure you are aware these are propriatory drivers made by ati themselves, which overall give much better performance than those supplied with Xfree. Anyway to cut a long story short they didn't work. To test further though, I tried the gentoo experimental Live cd (a kind of alternative to Knoppix) and again the drivers didn't work. Just for kicks I decided to try a Lindows demo live CD I got in a magazine, which I know uses these drivers too - but sadly still no luck.

Fortunately Lindows technical support were very responsive. This is what they said about this issue:

The 2.4.20 Linux kernel doesn't support AGP 8x. AGP is a type of connection for video, and most video cards that you can buy in a store today are AGP. So, if you have a motherboard that supports AGP 8x, and you have a card that supports AGP 8x, like the ATI 9500, you will not
be able to get any video in LindowsOS, or other Linux distros. We investigated this and found that often there is no bios option to select your AGP bus speed, the bios always does the maximum possible.

For this issue, not getting any video means literally, you will get a black screen. No 3d, no 2d, no console, nothing.

But, if you have a motherboard, or a video card, that only supports AGP 4x or lower, you will have video in LindowsOS. So, that might be a work around for people with high end motherboards and high end video cards, until we move to the 2.5 or 2.6 series of linux kernels.


Is this accurate, or are they just BS'ng me? I know everyone hates Lindows, but it's the closest I've come to an answer so far. Also, if this is true, can it be fixed? Is there a patch or something somewhere I can apply? (The only thing is I don't know how useful a patch will be, since I never learned how to do patching yet. ).

Anyway, if anyone knows how to fix this, please let me know. All comments are very appreciated.

Q

Did you check your bios to see if you can change your agp rate ?
If so, change your AGP to 4x in your bios, this should help.

Well that is the obvious answer. But my bios won't let me change to 4X. Well that is to say, if I select 4X, my video card locks up. So I can't do it.

Q

Which mobo/chipset do you have ?

It could be a possible bug in your bios, so be sure to check your mobo manufacturers site to see if this is a know problem that can be solved by flashing you bios, normally you should be able to switch to 4x without any problems, i'dd even recommend it because on some chipsets agp8x seems to lower the performance of 8x cards.

I think its my video card and not the bios. If I use my brothers radeon 9800 Pro card, it works fine and I can change to 4x without a problem. But then again, he isn't parting with that card any time soon.

It's just one of those weird harware combo things I guess. Either way I suspect the4re may be a patched 2.6 kernel or something I can use somewhere. You would have to think there are more people than me with 8x AGP video cards atm. I agree about the 8x vs 4x thing though. Overall it doesn't make a huge difference - if any. But again, because of my predicament, it's not very helpful to me right now.

Anyway, thanks for the response.

Q