[gentoo-user] ATI X trouble, again

External Since: Dec 18, 2006 Posts: 75

Hi there!

Now all this X stuff is becoming really annoying. I struggled for days to
get it to work again after the upgrade to 1.6. I have a Radeon HD3200 and
tried using fglrx, radeon, radeonhd, vesa, or no xorg.conf at all. I got a
blank screen only and no apparent errors in the Xorg log. So it seems X was
running fine, apart from having a blank screen.

I had similar problems when I started with this machine half a year ago.
With every update of kernel, X or ati-drivers, I fear that my X will not
work when I reboot. And half of the times this is true. For some three years
before I had an old NVidia card, and experienced the same. But then I could
just change driver from nvidia to nv and got X running, just without
acceleration. What is quite annoying with my ATI card is that often I cannot
go back to text mode then I try something new in my xorg.conf, and have to
reboot. I know about Alt-SysRq-R, this works sometimes (but only once, not
if I start X again), and sometimes it does not.

The good news is, that with 2.6.31-tuxonice and ati-drivers-9.9-r2 suddenly
all is working perfectly. For this time, let's see what the next update will
do.

But there is this machine of a friend which I just updated. She did not do
this for about a year, mostly because she also had lots of troubles in
configuring her X. She needs a working TV-out, which complicates things even
more. And so she did not dare to change her working setup, I can understand
this.

Now I upgraded the machine, which was some trouble, too, many blockers and
such. That's done, all is perfectly fine I think. But I did that from
remote, now I tried to start X. Guess what happened. No apparent errors with
radeon, radeonhd or without xorg.conf, but the screen just goes blank, the
TFT enters suspend mode. With vesa, X hangs so I cannot go back into text
mode and have to reboot.
I replaced her TFT with a CRT monitor. Same result, whether I configure this
monitor or not, when I start X it complains about bad frequencies.

I did not try ati-drivers. Her card is a RV505 (Radeon X1550 Series) which
is no longer supported by current ati-drivers. Older drivers might still
work for a while, but only with kernels < 2.6.29. And I suspect the problem
is not the driver itself, because radeon does not work, too, and I also had
similar problems of a blank screen with an ATI card and different drivers.

Today is her birthday, I intended to present her the updated PC with
accelerated X and KDE4, but now she cannot use it at all.

Any idea what do to now? Apart from buying a new graphics adapter, which
might work, or might not work. Or trying more monitors. The xorg.conf and
some log files are here, in case someone wants to have a look:
http://wonkology.org/~wonko/tmp/tanja/

Thanks,
Wonko

External Since: Sep 03, 2004 Posts: 967

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Alex Schuster <wonko.DeleteThis@wonkology.org> wrote:
> JesÃºs Guerrero writes:
>
>> On Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:47:44 +0200, Alex Schuster <wonko.DeleteThis@wonkology.org>
>> wrote:
>
>> What kind of blank is it? Do you see the mouse pointer at least? Do the
>> monitor(s) stay on or do they go into standby mode?
>
> The monitors complain about bad frequencies. The TFT then enters standby
> mode, the CRT continues trying to show something, but I only see the
> "frequency out of range" message.
>
>> I've had issues with
>> radeon in the past, and after asking in the mailing list it seemed like
>> some issue with my AGP card. Some developer suggested to try this in the
>> xorg.conf file and it worked for me:
>>
>> Â Option Â Â Â "BusType" "PCIE"
>>
>> And yes, it's an AGP card. The logic behind this is out of my
>> understanding. You can see the thread here:
>>
>> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.freedesktop.xorg.drivers.ati/10628/ma
>> tch=i92guboj
>
> Tried that, but it did not help.
>
>> If you have problems with the radeon (not fglrx or radeonhd) driver, I
>> suggest posting to that list. It's probably the best place to get help if
>> the standard procedures do not work.
>
> Thanks! I will do that.
>
> Â Â Â Â Wonko

BTW - EVERY problem I was having when I dealt with this sort of thing
a couple of months ago was visible in some sense in the Xorg.0.log
files. I would look for errors, figure out what was causing them,
mostly being config issues in my case, and then fix them and try
again. It really paid to sort of dig into that file and try to look
closely at every warning message along with the more obvious error
(EE) messages.

I also got help on the same ATI list you were pointed out. Very helpful folks.

Good luck,
Mark