ATI RADEON 9600

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Ryan J Zygar wrote:

>So when I rebooted today into the newest kernel, I got a prompt to 
>config my Radeon card I enable it that is the prompt. Then on to XFree 
>and so I chose the Video Card Radeon 9600 and the Monitor Viewsonic 
>PF790 and Video Setting 1280X1024. It continues to GREAT fedora login. 
>I login and as Gnome starts to load _CRASH_ the machine just hangs.

Keep in mind that the redhat-config-xfree86 tool configures only
the drivers supplied with the distribution.  If you use
unsupported 3rd party drivers such as the ATI or Nvidia
proprietary drivers, you need to use their own configuration tool 
or hand edit the config file and tweak it while following their 
'README' documentation et al.  The ATI fglrx and nvidia drivers 
will not be used by the distribution config tools.


>Login screen login/password Gnome starts loading.... STOP! It hangs 
>mouse is dead machine is dead no CNTRL-ALT-DEL either. HUNG.

Unfortunately you're not using the Red Hat supplied kernel, so 
any number of problems could be occuring.  Best thing to do is 
boot with the Red Hat supplied kernel and use that.  If you need 
the unsupported NTFS module, there is prebuilt rpm packages of 
the NTFS module on freshrpms.net IIRC, or http://ntfs.sf.net or 
somesuch, although I don't recall the specific details.


>Load back in and CNTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE 6 times to break out of the
>GDM.  Console is just fine. PROMPTED that X will restart in 2
>minutes. I delete XFConfig to buy sometime. Crazy enough it
>doesn't detect the card. Used a VESA driver edited the PROMPTS
>from redhat-config-xfree (KILLER APP BTW) Select Radeon 9600 and
>Viewsonic PF790 and it writes the file /etc/X11/XFconfig of
>course and restarts X (GREAT JOB REDHAT).  Login and start up as
>soon as the Gnome Dialog comes up no Icons stream across and
>HUNG!

The config tool will configure the card to use the "radeon" 
driver, and ignore ATI's binary driver.  I don't know if ATI's 
drivers overwrite the libGL, libglx and other things in the same 
manner as Nvidias do or not, but if they do, this could cause 
potential hangs as well.

>insmod radeon
>insmod radeonfb

Both of those are wrong and bad.  "radeonfb" is Radeon 
framebuffer module which is unrelated to what you are trying to 
accomplish.  "radeon" module is the kernel DRM module for Radeon 
hardware.  XFree86 does not support DRI on Radeon 9600 at all, so 
that module wont do anything for you, although it will interfere 
with the ATI binary modules should you try to use them.  In 
short, you never ever ever ever need to load kernel modules by 
hand with insmod or modprobe to use XFree86.  The X server will 
load whatever modules it needs automatically, and if it doesn't 
then you've either got misconfiguration of something or 
misinstallation of drivers.


>The VESA driver works fine and I can use that but then I have
>800x600 display and like 50HZ of refresh. So you know that I
>didn't buy the card for that :-)

The "radeon" driver will work with full 2D acceleration but 
without 3D using the distribution supplied "radeon" driver.  
Again however, installation of ATI's binary drivers may or may 
not disable your ability to use the distribution supplied driver.  
I haven't looked at recent ATI drivers to see how they install 
themselves and what if anything they change.

>What on earth can this be I wonder? My machine is broken.  I
>figure remove the MESA* stuff reload the glrx-glc22*rpm from ATI
>and just try again.

Uninstall ATI's drivers, reinstall all of the XFree86 rpms that 
come with the distribution including Mesa.  Run:

redhat-config-xfree86 --reconfig

You should have working 2D only video.  Then if you prefer to 
install ATI's drivers, please read the README documentation et 
al. that come with ATI's drivers, which give quite detailed 
instructions on how to get the driver properly installed, 
configured and working.

I definitely recommend doing all of this with the Red Hat 
supplied kernel though.

Hope this helps.

Good luck!
TTYL


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat