ati is not able to make its driver work...

[yoshi314]

my friend recently tried ubuntu on his new pc. i believe he has 2900xt ati card.

we tried for 3 days straight to make it work with fglrx. (i could only help via IM because he lives far away from me).

in the end he gave up and came back to windows xp, because ubuntu would always fall back to failsave vesa driver with unbearable refresh rate and 800x600 video resolution (despite all configuration attempts from my side).

sadly, that pretty much destroyed any hopes i had left for fglrx. he wanted working 2d and 3d, so radeonhd/radeon drivers were out of the question. i thought that since 8.35.5 ati drivers were less troublesome. i guess not.

[bridgman]

Yoshi, do you know what error messages your friend was getting ? Were they using the fglrx which came with the distribution or downloading a newer one ?

[SneakyPhil]

Yoshi314

obvious troll is obvious

[yoshi314]

well the problem was the distance and the fact the my friend was expecting it to "just work". there were no errors in xorg log, as ubuntu decided to go into failsafe mode each and every time and make a new log, possibly overwriting the previous one.

if i had physical access to that pc, i would have hopefully eventually pulled it off. but my friend didn't have enough patience, plus he is living quite far from me.

he tried on his own for two weeks, then started asking me for help and finally got tired and went back to windows :/

he had fglrx kernel module loaded into memroy, as well as xorg module installed in the system, i gave him a proper xorg.conf. and it just didn't work. time after time, it would simply use vesa driver with failsafe settings.

anyway it's too late to think about possible explanations. he doesn't feel like trying linux out for another year or so. i felt kind of "defeated" when he said so.

Yoshi, do you know what error messages your friend was getting ? Were they using the fglrx which came with the distribution or downloading a newer one ?

i believe he used one that's supplied via restricted-manager in 7.10 right now. envy tool didn't work for him, bailing out with python syntax errors. so it could be a couple releases behind current fglrx.

i really didn't feel like dragging him through module-assistant, or by hand package generation. he just wasn't up for doing that kind of stuff, and i didn't have an ubuntu install around to guide him on my end. i was even considering installing ubuntu on a spare partition and making him the packages, but he decided to call it quits before i could pull it off.

[bridgman]

Yeah, understood. That's the kind of situation I'm hoping the open source drivers will eliminate -- giving the distros the ability to make everything "just so" on their own specific package. Hopefully things will get a lot easier starting with 8.04, where the open drivers are available out of the box.

I am disturbed that the logs got over-written though -- we'll need to see if there is a way to prevent that.

Thanks,
JB

[Melcar]

Yeah, the restricted drivers on the Gutsy repos are horribly outdated and won't support newer cards. About 70% of all graphics card related complaints on the Ubuntu forums is do to the user using the restricted driver manager and expecting it to work with their new cards.
And the logs are pretty useless. It's impossible for me to even guess as to why my xserver crashes (locking my PC and leaving the display black) when I run games, simply because it either doesn't log anything or starts new entries; all I can surmise is that it's a fglrx issue, but without knowing the cause, it's impossible to file a proper report to the developers, except saying that "it crashes" or "doesn't work"... yeah, great help that would be .

[yoshi314]

am disturbed that the logs got over-written though -- we'll need to see if there is a way to prevent that.

the logs might have moved. i usually have /var/log/Xorg.69.log or something similar in name when a X crash happens. i forgot about it, since my X crashes quite rarely.

[sundown]

sadly, that pretty much destroyed any hopes i had left for fglrx. he wanted working 2d and 3d, so radeonhd/radeon drivers were out of the question. i thought that since 8.35.5 ati drivers were less troublesome. i guess not.

I think I completely gave up on the fglrx in the beginning of the month, when supposedly video playback was not going to tear anymore.

I guess people at ATi don't watch 720p and 1080p
Playback tears with radeon as well.
My one and only hope remains radeonhd

[Melcar]

I think I completely gave up on the fglrx in the beginning of the month, when supposedly video playback was not going to tear anymore.

I guess people at ATi don't watch 720p and 1080p
Playback tears with radeon as well.
My one and only hope remains radeonhd

You can watch HD content? It's all jerky playback on mine. Have all the right codecs installed, the latest drivers, and I can see that very little CPU is being used, yet they're unwatchable except as a slide show.

[oblivious_maximus]

the logs might have moved. i usually have /var/log/Xorg.69.log or something similar in name when a X crash happens. i forgot about it, since my X crashes quite rarely.

I wouldn't be surprised if Ubuntu does something different, but if it's writing a new log when it goes into failsafe mode, you should be able to find the older log from immediately before the failsafe Xserver started at /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old.