ati gfx card drivers

pickarooney

I'm trying to install Mandrake Linux 9.0. Everything works fine until it tries to detect my graphics card in order to configure Xwin. It recognises it as an ATI radeon 7000, but can't find any usable graphics modes. I've tried selecting my gfx card, other radeons, and a generic vga driver, to try and get at least some kind of usable config, but all to no avail.

Q1)How is it able to display the installation screens if it can't find any usable drivers for my gfx card?

Searching the web, I couldn't find any specific radeon 7000 drivers, but a couple of generic radeon drivers. The problem is that these are in .rpm format and I can only log into linux in command line mode as it stands.

Q2)Is there a way of converting rpm files to .tar.gz or some way of opening them from the command line?

Q3)Better yet, does anyone have a similar card and know where to get a driver in a usable format?

Thx.

Typedef

The answer is that the installation proggie uses a frame buffer driver.

If you can get the right driver in rpm format then from the command line 'as root' type.

rpm -i some_rpm.rpm

If this rpm package has dependancies, you'll have to satisfy them.

Dare to Slack baby.

pickarooney

Not sure what happened, but typing rpm -i <rpmname>.rpm did absolutely nothing. I tried a .tar.gz version of the drivers, but they gave me 173 errors. Looks like the card is just not supported

*sigh* another botched linux installation. Next up, FreeBSD.

longword

You could always talk to this nice man who has no problems with his ATI Radeon 7000 under Linux.

Typedef

That means the rpm installed without error.

That is good.

Could you post the X config you are using.
In your x config you should have a line listing the driver module to use.

the Nvidia driver par example is listed as "nvidia" in the section marked driver of /etc/X11/XF86Config and this driver must be in the correct path for X to load it.

I reckon you simply are having a problem loading the correct driver or haven't defined the correct modelines (which can be done by hand if necessary) to get the graphics card/monitor working sweetley.

Mandrake is good for automagic configuration of X incidentally.

As far as I can tell it is quite possible to get X working with the ati radeon 7000.

A qucik search of justlinux.com gives.

http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=86101&highlight=ati+radeon+7000

bwkaz
Moderator
thought that XFree86 4.2 came with drivers for 3D on the Radeon 7000? Hmm... is your Driver set to "radeon" in your XF86Config? Are both "glx" and "dri" loading? Do you have a "DRI" section in there as well, with a Mode "0666" (at least, I think it's Mode...) in it?

If so, you might want to look at dri.sourceforge.net, there might be something worthwhile there...

Do as the man says.

Cuidado con el gato baby.

pickarooney

There's no XF86Config file in /etc/X11 (as the config couldn't be set up successfully) but there is a .test file with my desired config. See attached. I believe the radeon drivers I got are only for models 8700 and above, so I'll have to have another scout around.

Having a look at dri.sourceforge.net now, to see if there's any useful links.

longword

ATI's binary only drivers will not work with Radeon 7000, but the standard XFree86 4.2.x drivers should support that card perfectly, both 2D and 3D, without additional drivers. They do need a bit of kernel help including the agpgart module.

When XFree86 4 loads it looks for /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. If it doesn't find it, it'll try for /etc/X11/XF86Config. If you run 'XFree86 -configure' as root it'll build you its best guess at a config file. Might work, might not. If it doesn't, have a look at the radeon man page for some of the options you can use on that driver in the Section "Driver" of your XF86Config.

Either way, keep an eye on /var/log/XFree86.0.log for clues.

pickarooney

I managed to get X configured using the vesa driver with 8-bit colours, so I can at least access the internet from within Linux now, which saves a lot of rebooting. I don't know a whole lot about ATI cards, but checking the sticker on the box, my card has a dodgy "powered by ATI" logo as opposed to a "built by ATI", which may explain why the driver included with Mandrake doesn't work ?

longword

Nope. Any old Radeon 7000 card should work with the open source XFree86 drivers. If the radeon driver doesn't work, there should at least be some kind of excuse in the XFree86.0.log or /var/log/messages.

pickarooney

I'll reproduce the log in a bit, as it will involve changing the graphics card driver, which will then cause Xwindows to crash, and oblige me to reinstall linux (I tried saving the working XF86Config-4 file and overwriting the bad one with it, but that didn't seem to work )

pickarooney

Ok, I changed back to the Radeon driver, then checked the new .log in /var/log. Towards the end there were the following errors:

(EE) RADEON (0) : no valid mode found for this DFP/LCD

(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration. try to change some parameters.

I'm using a normal CRT monitor, btw.

The log also contained a hint to add in an 'Option "CrtScreen"' line. It didn't specify whether to add this in the Monitor or screen section, so I added it into the monitor section., and commented out a line with info for a Sony Vaio laptop screen.

Logged out. Machine died. Rebooted. Keyboard was now inactive (wtf?). Logged out. Machine died.
Turned off machine. Restarted, keyboard was still dead. Logged out successfully, keyboard came alive again.

This is the stage I'm at now, the xfdrake config lists the correct (Radeon) driver, a resolution of 1024x768 and 24bpp colour depth. The resolution is fine, but there are only 256 colours.

pickarooney

The current .log file :