I got myself a Dell Latitude D600 laptop about a month ago and installed Mandrake 9.1 on it. It has been running pretty smoothly - as long as one is satisfied with skipping the agpgart module. The D600 has the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 32MB DDR video card, aka ATI Radeon M9, and I thought I should share my success in installing the fglrx driver with agp. For more info on this video card and the D600, look at
http://www.dell.com/us/en/gen/learnm...ry_details.htm
Anyway, let's take it from the start.
In the installation of Mandrake 9.1 (kernel 2.4.21-0.18) I had to choose the graphics driver by hand. The second try it worked with the ATI Radeon driver and the Generic Flat Panel 1400x1050 display. However, with this driver - which I guess is XFree86's own - I can't get the agpgart module working. There were lots of error messages in the logs of the type:
Linux agpgart interface v0.99 (c) Jeff Hartmann
agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 816M
agpgart: Unsupported Intel chipset (device id: 3340), you might want to try agp_try_unsupported=1.
agpgart: no supported devices found.
I tried the agp_try_unsupported=1 option by appending the line
options agpgart agp_try_unsupported=1
to /etc/modules.conf (and ran depmod -a), but then I could not log out without freezing the screen. Since then I've been using
alias agpgart off
in the modules.conf to just disable the whole thing and get rid of the error messages.
After reading
this and
this post I finally got a driver that supported the XFree86 4.3 version that MDK 9.1 has. The drivers provided by
ATI themselves only support XFree86 4.1 and 4.2. The driver compatible with XFree86 4.3 can be downloaded from
http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_ati.html
It's the glx1_linux_X4.3.zip file =) The Check.sh in the package did not work for me, so I downloaded the Check.sh that ATI provides at the URL mentioned above.
To avoid screwing everything up I tried to follow the advice in
this post, but Mandrake does not seem to have the rpm2tgz tool, so I did
rpm -i --force fglrx-glc22-4.3.0-2.9.13.i586.rpm
which worked ok after removing the radeon module with "rmmod radeon". The only problem was that the drmP.h patch was rejected - which apparently doesn't matter. Don't forget to have the kernel source linked in /usr/src/linux when you do this.
Now you can do an "insmod fglrx", or even better, "modprobe -v fglrx" to see that the module is loaded properly.
Next thing is to run the fglrxconfig, but alas, there you have to know the horizontal sync and vertical refresh rates, which I couldn't understand where to get. (It is
not written in
Dell's specs.) However, this is written loud and clear in the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file! Or at least, the configuration that
has been working for me with the XF86 radeon driver is there. In the Section "Monitor", it says:
HorizSync 31.5-90
VertRefresh 59-75
Aha! Be careful with this, however, as wrong settings can cause difficulties and/or damage to your display, but this setup works in my case. Or at least, my display hasn't shown any sign of falling apart - yet =] (Is there anyone here who knows what they
really are?) In the XF86Config-4 file there are also the mouse and keyboard settings that the fglrxconfig asks for. My choices for the display mode were
"1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480" for 24-bit
All of these are probably not needed, but hey, what do I know? =)
In the fglrxconfig I also chose to use the built-in agp support of the fglrx module instead of loading the kernel agpgart module.
...restarting the Xserver...
Oh no! Mouse isn't working! Lucky me that I had put the old XF86Config-4 somewhere. Just change the erroneous mouse setup in the new file to the old settings. Also, I noticed that the sound in xine didn't work in the configuration that fglrxconfig made. Looking in the old config file - load the module v4l in the Module section.
If there are any other problems, they can probably be fixed in the same way since the old and new XF86Config-4 files are very similar - the only real difference is the Device section that now defines the fglrx module instead of the old radeon module. Now you can also disable the kernel radeon module by putting an "alias radeon off" in /etc/modules.conf. I noticed that my module was loaded but unused - use lsmod to check this - so this posed no problem. It's anyway XF's driver you're using and not the kernel module.
It might be that the DRI isn't enabled, which can be checked by the issuing "glxinfo". In that case,
this might be to some help - worked for me.
In hindsight, I've had some problems with X freezing, but since I changed my XF86Config-4 to the old "default" file but with the Section "Device" changed to the one set up by fglrxconfig this seems to be fixed.
The
DRI project now seems to have appropriate drivers but I haven't tested them.
I hope this will make life easier for some of you.
Cheers,
Stefan