# [SOLVED]ATI Radeon Mobility HD5870/Asus G73JH & fglrx issues

## grubber33

Hello all, coming back to gentoo after a few years away and I'm trying to get it set up on my Asus G73JH laptop. Problem is the closed-source drivers aren't playing nice. I can get it to start with the "radeon" driver but when I try to use fglrx, either through a manual xorg.conf change or aticonfig, I get a black screen (or a couple times a white blob moving across the screen) and then the system hangs. The biggest problem with this is I can't access the output from the X server and nothing is being written to the log files (probably because I have to hard-reboot). I've googled and read just about everything I can and I'm pretty much lost for ideas now. I'm not too good with troubleshooting Linux since it's been a while but there are a couple things that would be really helpful to me: a way to save whatever X puts out before the system hangs and a comparison from someone who plays decently graphics-intensive games between fglrx and the open source driver because I don't mind using the open source drivers as long as performance is comparable. Any extra information I can post I will as requested but I think being able to review the X output is a good place to start! Any help is greatly appreciated!

AaronLast edited by grubber33 on Thu May 05, 2011 7:41 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## DONAHUE

Suggest backup your radeon kernel and its config, then recompile kernel with this for applicable portions of menuconfig.

if you have radeon-ucode builtin as directed in http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml fglrx will fail much as you describe

 *Quote:*   

>  Device Drivers  --->  
> 
> Generic Driver Options  --->
> 
>  (/sbin/hotplug) path to uevent helper
> ...

 

Suggest VIDEO_CARDS="fglrx" and INPUT_DEVICES="evdev", no extras in these lines, in /etc/make.conf.

Remove any video= vesa= vga= kms= entries from the kenel line in /boot/grub/grub.conf; example:   *Quote:*   

> kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.38-gentoo-r4 root=/dev/sda3

  no extra parameters

```
emerge --unmerge xorg-server $(qlist -IC x11-drivers)

emerge xorg-server ati-drivers radeon-ucode xf86-input-evdev

aticonfig --initial

reboot
```

this all works with an hd5770

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## grubber33

That worked perfectly! Thank you so much!

Aaron

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## DONAHUE

wahoo!!

now that you are up you can play with  *Quote:*   

> < > Userspace VESA VGA graphics support # see http://dev.gentoo.org/~spock/projects/uvesafb/
> 
> or
> 
> [ ] VESA VGA graphics support 

  if you want some boot splash

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