# Xorg Configuration Issue When Installing ATI Drivers

## Jicksta

I'm having a problem installing my ATI fglrx video card drivers and frankly I'm tired of F'ing with it. I've spent about every ounce of my free time for the past week trying to sort out this problem to absolutely no avail. I need someone to diagnose the problem, and using any means possible, fix it-- just get it done. I'll provide any information or ssh access needed.

Here're some specs:

ATI Radeon 9600 All-In-Wonder

AMD Sempron 2200+

Biostar M7VIG motherboard

Compaq Presario MV900 monitor (a hand me down, I swear!)

Official Propietary ATI Linux Drivers v8.10.19 from portage (ati-drivers)

Gentoo 2005.0

Xorg v6.8.2-r1

For the individual who fixes the problem, I will give access to my professionally hosted web server at no charge. You will receive:

400MB Storage

10GB/month transfer

99.9% uptime

Well equipped bash shell account

A private FTP account

A subdomain of Jicksta.com

An email account for your subdomain

PHP4/Perl CGI support

MySQL database

A Jicksta.com Jabber screen name

 :Evil or Very Mad:  The Necessary Disclaimer:

Keep in mind, all services offered are subject to my judgement. I pay for this hosting myself so I have no obligation to keep paying my provider to keep you outfitted. All services are liable for termination, as I see fit, however, I'm not a jackass and will not terminate the service for any unjustified reason. This is meant to be a generous award for someone who helped me through a major problem. How long the service stays available is really undeterminate. I've paid my provider until October 2005, so that is the maximum I can offer, as I can't guarantee I'll stay with them (I want JSP hosting). I'll keep things fair, though, don't worry.

The award goes to the person who sets my X server up with hardware acceleration enabled-- you'll receive extra brownie points and more rewards if you get the GATOS drivers working for my All-in-Wonder TV-in feature (the real reason I bought this card) or if you set me up with the recently released v8.12.10 ATI drivers which haven't made it to portage at the time of this writing (1:30 AM, 4/11/5). If you are considering taking me up on my offer, please understand it'll require some serious xorg.conf surgery, past experience setting up an ATI driver and/or GATOS driver, and you'll need to work around my agenda as a student.

My email address is Jicksta-at-Gmail-dot-com. Email me if interested or post any questions you may have here.

I'll edit this post when my problem has been resolved.

Thanks,

JickLast edited by Jicksta on Tue Apr 12, 2005 12:40 am; edited 2 times in total

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## tomvollerthun

Hi jicksta.

Maybe you have already tried it that way, but perhaps you're better off by just posting a question and ask for help?

Normally the people around here do what they do for free and fun, so if there's some award included, many (me including) might think of some odd advertisment (especially since you posted an email address, which is quite uncommon)

This is not a commercial support: we're not paid, and many don't want to be paid. Many won't be willing to do exclusive work, so there's a lot of goodwill and knowhow lost for you, if you just want to give something to one instead of the community.

Adding to that, normally it's not one person helping out, but someone asking the right question which makes someone else think about something, and you providing information that reminds a third one of something he'd read in some exotic site.

Someone else puts it all together to a consistent picture and another one makes it running on your box. Then a package manager tries to make it generally available for gentoo by creating a patch, which gets feedback again, thus making the solution even better. Not to forget that you yourself are working together with all these persons, provide information, try things, think by yourself and so on.

So in the end, you'd either have to be unfair by just awarding one of the crowd of helpers, or you'd have to give the award to the whole community (including yourself ;) .

Be it as it wants: you have posted a lot of information about your offer and even a disclaimer, but almost nothing about your problem. You write that you've tried a lot of things. If you want to be helped, say what you tried, which information you've gathered, where you searched. Tell us the behaviour you expect and what behaviour you experience. Tell us what you think it is.

tom

P.S.: I am by no means a spokesman of anyone but me, and there are probably a lot of persons who disagree, but that's how I feel.

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## Jicksta

Okay, I picked up some free time so I'll try to address some of the questionable issues with this post.

As an enthusiastic supporter of online communities, I certainly see your source of concern: this guy (me) is tainting our forums with bribes and may start greedy disputes over who gets the gig. This is absolutely a valid concern.

But as someone who loves to help someone with a problem and greatly appreciates time spent by a stranger examining a problem of my own and offering a solution, I often feel I should reward them in some way-- some way small but thoughtful and helpful. If someone would like to take my problem and spend the time working with me to resolve it, I feel I have every right to pay back the generosity. I don't see this as a business or "commercial" relationship, but more of as a "Hey, we're friends now. For giving me access to your resources of knowledge, you can have access to my resources of hosting."

When a conclusion is reached and the problem solved, I'll try to document the problem thoroughly and post back here with a mini how-to describing the steps taken to solve it. I'm sure I'm not the only person who will ever have this problem. Additionally, with the open, editable nature of wikis, I'll try to incorporate some applicable mentioning of this potential problem in the appropiate section alerting the user to take precaution to not duplicate my problem.

Okay, I'll try now to offer some insight into what has been causing my problem.

As everyone knows, ATI's linux driver support is pretty lowsy. My drivers and xorg emerged fine so I am pretty certain my problem lies in my xorg.conf file. When I used fglrxconfig to generate a new configuration file and restart X, output isn't sent to my monitor; it just says "UNUSUABLE SIGNAL" until I hit CTL+ALT+BACKSPACE to kill the server. After a few days of running X in the default resolution of 640x480, making probably thirty xorg.conf files a day, I had the idea to install SUSE and copy the xorg.conf file it generates over to my Gentoo partition. This worked, yay! But what about hardware acceleration?

Originally, I thought the lack of monitor output was a result of a bad hsync/vsync combination, but now, after seeing what SUSE generated and trying it in fglrxconfig, I know this can't be the case. I even dug around and pulled out another monitor to see if it would register the output-- no luck. I tried taking the SUSE generated conf file and merging it by hand with the conf file generated by fglrxconfig, but after about five attempts, I threw my hands up in the air. Even minor changes to the SUSE script resulted in 'UNUSUABLE SIGNAL.'  :Crying or Very sad:  I'm not well versed on the video hardware lingo so most of the choices I make in fglrxconfig are just guesses or defaults. This is where the help of someone else would really come in handy.

Most of the documentation is outdated and contains no mention of Xorg or much less an xorg.conf file, so I'm really in a boat without a paddle. I've searched this site and Google countless times, finding nothing which lead me any closer to a conclusion than where I was when I started. This has all been very stressful. This weekend I was supposed to write a scholarship essay, but literally all my time went to computer woes. This is entirely my fault, I know, but I was hoping to get this out of the way so I could concentrate. Now the deadline is too soon to finish it (must go in the mail today). Like I said in my first post, "I'm tired of F'ing with it."

If you may know what the trouble is or would like to perhaps attempt to fix it hands-on, you're most welcome.  :Smile: 

Once again, I apologize to those who find this thread offensive. I hope you'll understand my situation here.

Thanks,

Jick

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## riven

have you tried the file generated by fglrxconfig?

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## Jicksta

Riven, as mentioned in my last post, I've tried countless .conf files generated by fglrxconfig and even tried several times to merge a working SUSE .conf file with a fglrxconfig .conf file. Didn't work.  :Crying or Very sad: 

My two previous posts hopefully should give you at least a gist of what I've tried and what I've not.

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## riven

care to post up the Suse config?

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## curtis119

Jicksta, you don't have to offer to pay people here. In fact I would say it is discouraged. This forum is all about gentoo users helping each other in the spirit of community. I think you will find that you will get more help if you change the title to something that briefly describes the problem.

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## ONEEYEMAN

Did you try to look for the Linux driver of the card on the site of the company, that's producing the card?  :Smile: 

Thank you.

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## Jicksta

- Here is a copy of a fglrxconfig generated xorg.conf file

- Here is a SUSE generated working xorg.conf file

- Here is one copy of my xorg.conf file after an attempt to merge the two.

Curtis, I agree, my thread subject is a dash stark. I'll change it.  :Smile: 

OneEyeMan, the fglrxconfig drivers we're discussing are the official ATI drivers.

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## bsmith

The one thing I notice is that both files that don't work is the load statement of DRI. Just a thought. I'm having problems with DRI on my install maybe it'll help you.

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## Jicksta

Hmm,

BSmith, I tired commenting out the Load "dri"   #libdri.a line in the fglrxconfig generated script's Module section but still got the same problem. I'm pretty sure the DRI section settings are correct-- I'd really prefer to keep video card access restricted to the 'video' user group.

Is this what you had in mind?

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## Grrliegeek

There are three differences between the config files that stand out for me.

1 - The Suse config file (that works) is loading two modules that the fglrx generated file is not. This is my least likely candidate.

```

Section "Module"

  Load         "extmod"

  Load         "v4l"

```

2 - The SuSE config file has display depths missing in the other two config files. It also has a default depth of 16, where the fglrx file has a default depth of 24 I'd point this out as the most likely culprit. Yes, I know that the Radeon is capable of 24 bit display depth, but it may be that the configuration in Linux doesn't work with it. (Not a fault of the hardware but the drivers). 

3 - There is a Device section in SuSE that isn't in the fglrx file that may be relevant. I've included it below.

The relevant section from the SuSE file for #2 & 3:

```

Section "Screen"

  DefaultDepth 16

  SubSection "Display"

    Depth      15

    Modes      "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480" 

  EndSubSection

  SubSection "Display"

    Depth      16

    Modes      "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480" 

  EndSubSection

  SubSection "Display"

    Depth      24

    Modes      "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480" 

  EndSubSection

  SubSection "Display"

    Depth      32

    Modes      "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480" 

  EndSubSection

  SubSection "Display"

    Depth      8

    Modes      "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480" 

  EndSubSection

  Device       "Device[0]"

  Identifier   "Screen[0]"

  Monitor      "Monitor[0]"

EndSection

Section "Device"

  BoardName    "RV350 AP"

  BusID        "1:0:0"

  Driver       "radeon"

  Identifier   "Device[0]"

  Screen       0

  VendorName   "ATI"

EndSection

```

Try using this in the config file & let us know if it works.

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## riven

The suse configuration works because its is using the radeon driver not the fglrx driver.

This means you probably have the radeon driver installed, which is bad because it conflicts something nasty with the fglrx driver. Compile a new kernel but turn off -> Device Drivers -> Character devices -> DRI make sure you have your agpgart compiled in there too with your correct chipset. The recompile the new kernel, move it to /boot, change your boot loader's config if neccisary, and boot from the new kernel. Now you will need to re-emerge the ati-drivers, making sure you update the graphic output to fglrx (it tells you how to do this once you have emerged) also make sure that there is a line with "fglrx" (without quotes) at the very bottom of the file /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 (assuming a 2.6 kernel). Then create a new xorg.conf using fglrxconfig, put it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Reboot, and see what happens.

If it still fails, then post the contents of /var/log/Xorg.0.log for me to have a look at.

As the others have said, no prizes needed, its just for fun  :Very Happy: 

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## taipan67

I'm surprised 'Wedge_' hasn't posted here, yet.

Check out his FAQ, see if it contains anything you haven't seen elsewhere...

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## Jicksta

Okay guys, due to problems I'm having in other areas, I'm just going to do a full reinstall.

Before I format my drives and wipe everything I've worked on, I'd like to make sure I know exactly what it is I need to compile into the new kernel.

According to Riven's post, I need DRM and AGART, but is there anything else?

Maybe I should compile fglrx directly into the kernel?

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## riven

You cant compile fglrx into the kernel, because its 3rd party. 

Also you DONT want DRM/DRI.

You DO want agpgart (under character devices) along with your chipset below it. This is the chipset on your motherboard.

Infact, quote from wedge's FAQ

 *Quote:*   

> Question 2.1: Which kernel options are important for the ATI drivers?
> 
> The following kernel options must be set correctly:
> 
>     * Loadable module support -> Enable loadable module support: ENABLED
> ...

 

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