ATI dropped the ball again

[Panix]

I installed Lubuntu on my laptop that has an ATI RV250 card. But, there's video driver issues. I now understand that I need to disable KMS. I don't know how to do this so now I need to research/google. Thanks.

Once again, the problem is related to OSS drivers and some version of *Ubuntu. Yeah, so great that the ATI OSS and Ubuntu (oh, it's just fglrx that they care about working?) is on top of things.

[RealNC]

Well, Ubuntu claims to "just work", so they should have disabled KMS by default on chips that don't work with it. I guess that means you should report it to the Ubuntu bug tracker.

But since you're using a laptop, I'd say your best bet is fglrx for increased battery life; the OSS drivers lack good power management.

As for the actual question, KMS is disabled by passing the "modeset=0" option to the radeon kernel module. I've built my own kernel with the radeon driver built-in and have it disabled by default, but I guess you're using the distro kernel. In that case, try looking in /etc/modprobe.d/ for a file called "options". In that file, add this:

options radeon modeset=0

and either just reboot or shutdown X and try:

sudo modprobe -d radeon
sudo modprobe radeon

and then start X again.

[Kano]

Well when you add a file to /etc/modprobe.d (you don't need to change an existing file!) you need a .conf ending for it and run

update-initramfs -u

later. as kernel command line it is also possible to add

radeon.modeset=0

[DeepDayze]

You'd also need to add nomodeset on the grub kernel commandline. That will really suppress KMS at boot

[RealNC]

I thought using grub for that is only for when the driver is compiled-in into the kernel.

[Kano]

@DeepDayze

With the kernel i tested that option does nothing. For nouveau the option is similar:

nouveau.modeset=0

nomodeset does not help at all.

@RealNC

Test it, it works like that.

[LinuxID10T]

ATI dropped the ball? It sounds like Ubuntu's problem, not ATI's.

[Melcar]

ATI is guilty of everything.

[LinuxID10T]

ATI is guilty of everything.

Darn right!
Here is a list of things they are guilty of:

• Making blazing fast GPUs
• Using less power than the comparable Nvidia card
• Providing driver updates every month
• Creating sub-egg-cooking temperatures
• Beating everyone to the OGL 4/DX 11 market by a mile
• Being able to drive more than 2 monitors with a single video card
• General amazingness

[LinuxID10T]

Oh, I forgot their open source efforts. Too bad Nvidia doesn't have ANY. It is just sooooo uncool to release video card programming specifications, don't you think so?