ATI Radeon 9800

[John Horne]

On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 06:42 -0400, Claude Jones wrote:
> On Wed August 17 2005 6:15 am, John Horne wrote:
> > On Sun, 2005-08-07 at 22:02 -0700, Robert Bell wrote:
> > > Has anyone gotten fglrx drivers running on FC4 in a big desktop
> > > configuration? Is NVIDIA any better? I'd hate to scrap a really good
> > > (and expensive) card but I am at wits end.
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > Not in a big desktop config, I use just the one monitor. However, I
> > finally got my radeon 9600 to work fine under FC4. The problem was that
> > the 'BlockSignalsOnLock' option was set 'on' in xorg.conf. This caused
> > hard lockups with the screensavers (under both kde and gnome) . Setting
> > the option to 'off' and it all works fine now. I use the livna rpms and
> > then ran the fglrxconfig (or whatever) program to configure xorg.conf.
> >
> 
> John: Great tip. How did you discover this? I went through the same process, 
> but I changed very little in those config settings, because I couldn't find 
> any documentation on them, and most were so cryptically worded that I 
> couldn't intuit what they meant. I have two machines with Radeon 9200SE 
> cards. One locks up all the time with certain screensavers - I found the one 
> on this machine to be set to "on" as well. This machine didn't give me fits 
> with the screen saver, but I couldn't lock it. I just tried locking it after 
> changing the setting and it worked. 
> 
Hello,

I admit I am no X window/graphics expert, so have little actual
understanding of these options. However, the standard Fedora core 4
'radeon' driver man page talked about locking AGP pages and that this
could cause problems. I just sort of associated that with this option,
and tried changing it from on to off. What the heck it couldn't make
things worse! :-)

I found the lockup problem was with screensavers that prompted me for a
password. The little window asking for the password popped up, but the
machine then locked solid. Any screensaver which did not have the
'prompt for password' bit worked fine, regardless of whether it as a 2d
or 3d open-gl screensaver or not. The problem happened under KDE with
the kdeartwork screensavers ('euphoria' is the one I used), or under
GNOME with the xscreensavers (from the xscreensavers-gl rpm) using the
'fireworks3d' (I think) screensaver.



John.

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK  Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
E-mail: John.Horne at plymouth.ac.uk       Fax: +44 (0)1752 233839