Configuring an ATI device for dual head in Rawhide

[Jim Cornette]

Paul Michael Reilly wrote:
> The ongoing saga of dead dual head for ATI based devices continues.
> Using the latest Rawhide radeon driver, the situation is vastly
> improved over FC5, yet still far from the working state present in FC4
> (which I now consider to have been serendipitous). 
Never heard the term before:
serendipitous
      adj : being lucky in making unexpected and furtunate discoveries
  Configuring
> xinerama mode is doable and it works although it had to be done
> manually.  system-config-display is severely broken and bug reports
> have been filed into the Fedora Black Hole bug reporting system. 

THe bug reporting system is severely flawed and probably needs an 
accountability system that takes into account bugs sitting with no 
response. If there is such a provision for bugzilla, it does not seem to 
compell compliance.

  I've
> attempted a dozen variants on getting two separate X displays running
> on each head with no success so far.  My first attempt was to use the
> xorg.conf that worked successfully with FC4 but that resulted in a "no
> signal" condition with FC5 and on Rawhide. 

This may or may not lead to a path to check for possible problems. I 
have a system with two displays where one video cards starts the boot 
process via BIOS setting for the primary display. (Intel 815) - Then 
sometime within the boot initialization, text output changes to the 
secondary display. (ATI).
The text on the primary display is frozen, while the secondary display 
shows text mode past the transition to the ATI display.
Once X is started in single head mode, the GUI is started on the Intel 
display marked as primary. Once you exit X or ctl-alt-Fn to a text 
terminal, the secondary display shows the text and interactivity is 
possible. Text on the Intel displays what was showing when text 
displaying was transferred to the ATI card.

For dual-head operation, the Intel is primary, garbage is displayed on 
the ATI. Moving a mouse around the display shows activity but garbage.
Once you start the GUI and go back to text mode, the ATI display shows 
text but with no recognizable characters.

Now, I had an old entry for dual head problems and Adam Jackson did 
defer the bug report for consideration for resolution in the FC6 
timeline. (Deferred from FC5 since resolution timeline would not make FC5).
As far as I know, Adam is fairly new with RH/Fedora X problems but is 
big on the xorg-x11 scene. Hopefully the dual-head problem that exists 
now will b resolved within the FC6 timeframe. At least enough to get FC4 
luck to show up in FC6 releases.

  Then I tried a dozen or so
> variants attempting to guess how xorg.conf should be configured given
> the radeon man page.  Success by discovery can be both a very tedious
> and frustrating process, so I'm hoping that some X guru can suggest:

The xorg-x11 list has a lot of X gurus and their attitude is down to 
earth when I was subscribed to their list before.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg

Sorry, no guru here. I depend on their discovery and reliable setup 
programs.

> 
> 1) an xorg.conf file that actually does work for configuring separate
>    X displays in a dual head configuration with a recent Rawhide ati
>    driver (I'm using xorg-x11-ati-6.6.0-3) or
> 
> 2) an xorg.conf file that could be reasonably expected to work in a
>    dual head ati based system.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -pmr
> 

Jim

-- 
untold wealth, n.:
	What you left out on April 15th.