Radeon and xorg

[pingufunkybeat]

I've just checked, and I don't have any xorg.conf, and 3d is working fine.

I'll repeat: your problem is not the xorg.conf file, and I doubt that anything you edit there will make a difference.

sounds like a broken installation to me. I switched from nVidia after they stopped supporting my chipset, leaving KDE in a semi-usable state on my laptop.

[Panix]

I've just checked, and I don't have any xorg.conf, and 3d is working fine.

I'll repeat: your problem is not the xorg.conf file, and I doubt that anything you edit there will make a difference.

sounds like a broken installation to me. I switched from nVidia after they stopped supporting my chipset, leaving KDE in a semi-usable state on my laptop.

The OS is not installed. It needs the xorg.conf tweaked to be able to use the desktop effects settings at all.

The open source ati driver is terrible. The support is poor. I've read countless posts of what to have in the config file but nothing I've tried has allowed me to enable desktop effects without having a system crash.

[cb88]

The OS is not installed. It needs the xorg.conf tweaked to be able to use the desktop effects settings at all.

The open source ati driver is terrible. The support is poor. I've read countless posts of what to have in the config file but nothing I've tried has allowed me to enable desktop effects without having a system crash.

First off 90% of posts out there are for out of date methods to configure Xorg since well... you don't have to configure Xorg at all and especially older cards should be working fine such as your radeon 9000 which is an R2xx based card only newer cards need the newest DRM an R200 should work fine even with older DRM unless there is some incompatibility with newer Xorg


You don't need xorg.conf except for unusual setups like dual head or disabling/enabling certain settings explicitly

If you reeeaaally want an xorg.conf start with running X -configure (notice there is a space between X and -configure)

and then X -config /path/to/configfile to test if the config works and it should for such old hardware (not that old stuff is bad ...usually it just works and thats great)

if it doesn't work post the xorg.conf ... that would be the best way to continue for any help posting lspci would help too


Assuming you acually have a radeon 9000 IGP (RC350) I'm really not sure what DRM that card uses it might be R2xx or R3xx though I'm pretty sure it is R200 you should probably try an older distro from before when all the 3D rework came about I would suggest Debian Lenny since it should be using mesa 7.3 or 7.4 I think mesa 7.5+ is in a state of flux especually for more unusual cards like yours an IGP which is using system memory

Note: I have edited this post several times 8:15 AM EST

[Panix]

Some of the posts are outdated but some aren't. The issues seem related and the same problems seem to persist. That was my point.

I think our perspectives or definitions of what we call 'working' are different. I consider when an OS boots up and it crashes BECAUSE of the video driver to be considered NOT WORKING. Ubuntu has Compiz enabled by default and I have to boot via safe graphics mode in order to boot to the desktop without it crashing eventually (i.e. opening Firefox or resizng Synaptic window crashes the system).

When you can't use all features of the OS because of the video driver, I consider it not working (at least, not 100%).

I can provide you with anything you want. The ATI Radeon 9000 is R200-based, correct, and to be specific, RV250.

Here is the output:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon
RV250 [Mobility FireGL 9000] [1002:4c66] (rev 02)

According to the Think Wiki, the card has 32MB of video memory.

[barkas]

Getting my R500 working was not quite as easy as some here would lead one to believe.

With the change to DRI2 not only 3D but everything has been broken for me for months, only by going back to DRI1 without KMS and using radeonhd was I able to get usable graphics at all.
3D works, too, but very very slow - unusably so, but no matter, I can use 2D.

That is on gentoo ~amd64.

To be frank, graphics on open source linux drivers seem to be a mess at the moment (and have been for a while now).

If you want, I can post a configuration that works for me on gentoo (Thinkpad T60p). I don't use HAL, btw, since it horribly screwed up all of my input in X when it was new.

[bridgman]

If your 3D is "horribly slow" you might be getting software rendering rather than HW-accelerated rendering. What does the renderer string from glxinfo say ?

Kernel modesetting and DRI2 are still very new and is only just starting to be integrated into the distributions -- if you're looking for something that "just works" you should probably use a distro which has it fully integrated (eg Fedora 12) or stay with user modesetting for now.

It's a really good idea to get the standard (non-KMS, DRI 1) driver stack running well before experimenting with new things like KMS and DRI2. Normally the distros try hard to insulate you from ongoing development by using stable components - was the original issue that the out-of-box driver stack didn't work for you ?

[barkas]

If your 3D is "horribly slow" you might be getting software rendering rather than HW-accelerated rendering. What does the renderer string from glxinfo say ?

Kernel modesetting and DRI2 are still very new and is only just starting to be integrated into the distributions -- if you're looking for something that "just works" you should probably use a distro which has it fully integrated (eg Fedora 12) or stay with user modesetting for now.

It's a really good idea to get the standard (non-KMS, DRI 1) driver stack running well before experimenting with new things like KMS and DRI2.

That was the fun of it, glxinfo claimed to be fully accelerated with DRI2, the same was true for Xorg.log.
I had two distinct states: one with AIGLX and compositing, where it was very slow, and one without both, running on EXA and 2D, where it didn't redraw moving windows, but was fast.
kernel was 2.6.31-gentoo-r5, xf86-video-ati from today's git, mesa 7.6, xorg 1.7.
xf86-video-ati 6.12.4 still does not even run properly without kms on DRI1, only radeonhd works at all.
The above state with DRI2 persisted for about 2 months of continuous updating.

So, I can't recommend all that right now, it is still very much in a state of flux, where it won't work unless one hits the exact combination of software packages and I suspect the right hardware.

[Panix]

What's this about?:
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-x.../msg91092.html

...and how do you apply a patch?

I don't buy the statements that you can just utilize the opensource driver as is or on defaults. I guess if you don't need to run any hardware acceleration or any effects at all, maybe. But, that is just one bug report of many that I've come across. I think it depends on hardware but also what you do with your computer (video-related). But, from what I perceive, there are NO features that can be enabled until you modify xorg.

[barkas]

What's this about?:
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-x.../msg91092.html

...and how do you apply a patch?

I don't buy the statements that you can just utilize the opensource driver as is or on defaults. I guess if you don't need to run any hardware acceleration or any effects at all, maybe. But, that is just one bug report of many that I've come across. I think it depends on hardware but also what you do with your computer (video-related). But, from what I perceive, there are NO features that can be enabled until you modify xorg.

If you use a current opensource ati driver, you will get a reasonable featureset by default. I don't see that you need to modify any driver options via xorg.conf. It defaults to EXA+DRI, as far as I can see.

[bridgman]

I don't buy the statements that you can just utilize the opensource driver as is or on defaults. I guess if you don't need to run any hardware acceleration or any effects at all, maybe. But, that is just one bug report of many that I've come across. I think it depends on hardware but also what you do with your computer (video-related). But, from what I perceive, there are NO features that can be enabled until you modify xorg.

It probably depends a bit on distro as well. Probably fair to say that :

- for most people you can use the drivers out of box and they work

- certain hardware (mostly AGP and older IGP) needs xorg.conf tweaks to disable options for reliable operation -- as it becomes clear that problems occur with specific classes of hw the devs can tweak the defaults to make more things work out of box

- certain hardware (seems to be specific laptops) still need bug fixes to work and xorg.conf can only help by doing drastic things like turning off DRI and acceleration

Overlaid on top of this is constant work on performance and feature improvements, which add complexity and sometimes result in problems where older versions of the driver worked. This is where careful choice of branch & release by distros can help. It would be interesting to see how a distro like Ubuntu 9.04 worked out of box on your hardware, if you have an extra partition free for some testing.

...and how do you apply a patch?

There's a "patch" utility which applies diffs to your source code :

http://linux.die.net/man/1/patch

I think you have to be careful about running the patch from the right place in the source tree so that the file paths in the diff line up with the source tree. Then just rebuild.