...

And everything seems to go smoothly until I type in sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx Sax starts up and then the monitor goes out of range, and nothing is displayed. How can I get past this? How can I get SAX to start up with frequencies that will work with my monitor. I do know what the horizontal and vertical frequencies are supposed to be.

That happen to me with nivdia driver and samsumg monitor, I think X doesn't recognize your monitor, maybe because it's a new model.

I recommend the following:

1. start sax2 with the -r and -l or -v (and with -m 0=fglrx) to guarantee that X starts with a low resolution;

2. Configure X as you want;

3. Configure your monitor NOT CHOOSING OR ACCEPTING a model from the sax2 list, but loading the configuration from the CD that comes with your monitor.

Ok, that sort of worked.. at least we got the SAX2 graphics up and navigable.... but now the next problem... even with typing -m 0=fglrx it still sets the video card to VESA Frame buffer - as in FGLRX is NOT available. I've also gone and manually edited the xorg.conf file and set the video device to fglrx and it still comes up as ONLY a VESA Framebuffer device. Granted video does work, but VERY badly. Any suggestions? C.

Seams that you don't have the fglrx module...

First things first... just to check do "modprobe fglrx" as root ans check "dmesg" to verify how the module is loading...

Well, that loaded it.... but dmsg (grepped for fglrx) is loaded with errors. The biggest problem I've got here now is... I'm trying to do the support over the phone witha complete (albeit willing) Linux newbie... so I'm trying to dictate the instructiond over the phone. I'm tryign to get him to mail me the output... maybe I'll spot something in there :-( I told him to buy an nVidia card.... and he bought an ATI :-( I've never seen an ATI work right... sigh.. Anyway, now the driver line in xorg.conf says fglrx, fglrxinfo reports back the vendor renderer string and version as expected. glxinfo also reports back that the ATI driver is loaded.... but glxgears is sloooow and any gl game is so slow as to be unusable. So something is still not right. Not sure what though.... C.

Check this link "http://en.opensuse.org/ATI_Driver_HOWTO".

Anyway, let me tell you how I've done it.

1. Installed kernel sources and development stuff (gcc, etc.);

2. I unzip /proc/config.gz to the kernel dir sources : /usr/src/linux-2.6.16.13-4 (seams that only suse stores the running kernel config file in the /proc dir);

3. Run the run-kernel service to config the kernel sources;

4. Run the ATI file that you download. Watch if there are some switches that apply to your machine;

5. Finally.... run sax2 -r -l -m 0=fglrx

As you can notice, I went for a more "simple" installation and got it running. Let's hope the same for you.

OK... we installed (clean install) the fglrx drive according to the opesuse howto. sax2 was run and the fglrx driver is running.... ============ fglrxinfo display: :0.0 screen: 0 OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc. OpenGL renderer string: Radeon X1300 Series Generic OpenGL version string: 2.0.6011 (8.28.8) ============ lsmod | grep fglrx fglrx 396076 8 agpgart 28976 1 fglrx ============ So... fglrx is running... but... we have horrible frame rates. If we run anything GL itäs too slow to use. Something like glxgears gives very low frame rates for this card.. eg: ============ glxgears 1261 frames in 5.0 seconds = 252.196 FPS 1252 frames in 5.0 seconds = 250.384 FPS ============ I would expect a lot better performance with this driver on this card (ATI X1300). So guys.. what's next? What can we do to get this card working at the right speeds... the guy I'm helping out here is going through World of Warcraft withdrawal... I have very little time left to get this right before he kills me.... :-) C.

...

So... fglrx is running... but... we have horrible frame rates. If we run anything GL itäs too slow to use. Something like glxgears gives very low frame rates for this card.. eg:

Let me ask you if you setup the screen with the files from their CD?

Ummm... no. But there's a valid reason for that. This monitor has no "monitor drivers". The CD that comes with themonitor only has a PDF on the disk... nothing else. Besides, all that does is supply the Horizontal and Vertial sync frequencies... which I already know, and have manually changed in the xorg.conf. The freqs shoudl have no effect at all on the video card performance anyway... they have to do with how the monitor displays the info.... or am I totally out to lunch here? We rolled back one ATI driver version (removed the first rpm, unloaded the fglrx kernel module... installed the older driver rpm, and rebuilt the kernel module) Redid the xrog.conf using sax2 -r -l -m 0=fglrx and restarted X. It's marginally better...as in glxgears shows 450fps instead of 250fps.... still not the expected 8000fps. Anythign GL based...like the GL screensavers in KDE for example still run at 1 frame every 2 to 5 seconds... so it's definitely not right. Still lost on this one. I'm at the point where I'm ready to go buy this guy an nVidia card :-( C.

...

Ummm... no. But there's a valid reason for that. This monitor has no "monitor drivers". The CD that comes with themonitor only has a PDF on the disk... nothing else.

What is the brand and model of the screen? Is it correctly recognize by sax2?

It's an Acer A1916W (19" wide screen). It is not correctly recognised by SAX2, but... what difference does this make? I know the Horiz and Ver freq settings already. I set them manually... nad they are not teh source of teh problem... as far as I know... the problem now is the GL "speed"... not the fact that the refresh frequencies are off. With teh tip of using -l in the command to launch sax2 I'm easily able to go in and reset the resoution to 1440x900 and adjust the refresh rates (I can even do this manually in the xorg.conf file) The problem now, after stuggling with in installing the fglrx driver and building the kernel module (as outlined on the openSUSE Wiki) the GL ability of this card is virtually zero. Anything that uses GL is a no go - ie the GL screensavers... and GL Linux game... etc etc. The resolution (and refresh rates) is fine at 1440x900 with 24 bit color... there are no issues there... just no GL. C.

On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 08:52:43AM +0200, Clayton wrote:

Further on this.... I've added the rpm-md for http://www2.ati.com/suse to Smart (and YaST) and attempted to download the packages x11-video-fglrx and ati-fglrx-kmp-default. In both Smart and YaST, it fails to download either of these packages. (this was based on the instructions found here: http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories#ATI_Video_driver... and here: http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/ati-installer-HOWTO.html

I've also tried installing the drivers with the ATI graphical installer - making the RPM from that shell script. The drivers install fine - ie no errors. I can reconfigure my xorg.conf using sax2, and get the correct resolution for the attached monitor (1440x900) but anything that uses GL runs at about 1 frame every 2 or 3 seconds... this is definitely not correct for an ATI X1300...

More troubleshooting... I disconnected the TFT monitor, and connected an old 14" CRT that can do 1024x768 resolution... started over with the whole ATI driver install and configure routine (just in case it was choking on the monitor for some obscure reason)... I can get it all working with the correct resolution and refresh rates on the CRT... but absolutely no GL support...none.

In frustration, we did a full reformat and clean install (it's a fresh install anyway, so nothing is lost). Followed all the instructions as given.. and get the right resolution... and no GL support at all.

Is it actually possible to get an ATI card working? I can't think of anything else to try here... have I missed anything? Is there any way of getting the ATI repository working? Does anyone know of a place I can download the rpms for x11-video-fglrx and ati-fglrx-kmp-default?

What else can be done here? Suggestions or ideas anyone?

Actually it might just be that the ATI repository is broken currently. There is another bugreport, https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=203544 Ciao, Marcus

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I know the Horiz and Ver freq settings already. I set them manually... nad they are not teh source of teh problem... as far as I know... the problem now is the GL "speed"... not the fact that the refresh frequencies are off.

Just trying beeing systematic ...

Fair enough :-) We've done a lot more tinkering... and oddly enough after re-doing the exact same steps for the 97th time (removing the drivers with rpm -e, adding in the drivers again with rpm -ivh), we seem to have got some kind of result. GL is working at the moment - why I can't say, and I dont' know that I can even duplicate it again. We haven't checked to see if it'll survive a restart of X or a full system restart yet. Kind of afraid to do so since it's taken almost full time fighting with the stupid video card since Saturday evening to get this far. I'm not convinced that this state (working GL) will remain for long... and the really annoying thing is that we didn't do anythign differnt to the previous 96 times we tried to get it working..... very puzzled by the whole mess. C .

You can try:

#aticonfig --overlay-type=Xv

By default it uses opengl.

OK, tried that... it made soem nice neatly formatted changes to the xorg.conf We restarted X (and even rebooted just incase since the ATI howtos always say to reboot) and it didn't make any changes at all. Weird since my brother did an install of 10.1 last night on to a system with ATI and he followed teh exact same staps as I am and his works perfectly... although... he's using an older ATI card wheras I'm tryign to get it all working with a newer X1300 card. Don't know if that makes the difference... C.

On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 20:50 +0200, Clayton wrote:

So... fglrx is running... but... we have horrible frame rates. If we run anything GL itäs too slow to use. Something like glxgears gives very low frame rates for this card.. eg: ============ glxgears 1261 frames in 5.0 seconds = 252.196 FPS 1252 frames in 5.0 seconds = 250.384 FPS

I have found that with 10.1 on my notebook (ATi chipset with integraded/shared mem m200 graphics), with the newest drivers, 3D works fully, but very very slowly, roughly what you post. I analized the X logs, and found no apparent reason for this. Rolling back a few versions solved it for me. I'm currently using fglrx_6_9_0_SUSE101-8.26.18-1 Hans

On 05/09/06, clarkt@cnsp.com wrote:

...

On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 20:50 +0200, Clayton wrote:

...

So... fglrx is running... but... we have horrible frame rates. If we run anything GL itäs too slow to use. Something like glxgears gives very low frame rates for this card.. eg: ============ glxgears 1261 frames in 5.0 seconds = 252.196 FPS 1252 frames in 5.0 seconds = 250.384 FPS

I have found that with 10.1 on my notebook (ATi chipset with integraded/shared mem m200 graphics), with the newest drivers, 3D works fully, but very very slowly, roughly what you post. I analized the X logs, and found no apparent reason for this. Rolling back a few versions solved it for me. I'm currently using fglrx_6_9_0_SUSE101-8.26.18-1

Hans

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I have a HP dv5000 laptop with the ATI 200m chipset. I have not been able to get any driver after 8.24 to work. All I get is a black screen (DRI has loaded) and X11 has locked. Google searches show that many people with the 200m are having problems with any driver after 8.25.

If you have it working I'd like to know how you got it to work.

Are we talking 3D or 2D? SAX worked first time for me with whatever drivers it uses by default in SuSE 10.0 with a 200M Jeff Rollin

On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 16:13 -0600, clarkt@cnsp.com wrote:

I have a HP dv5000 laptop with the ATI 200m chipset. Mine is a HP nx6125 - mostly the same internals.

I have not been able to get any driver after 8.24 to work. All I get is a black screen (DRI has loaded) and X11 has locked. I get that too - X locks and takes keyboard and mouse with it. I got around this by dropping the -r and profile options from sax2, i.e. I just did sax2 -m 0=fglrx

If you have it working I'd like to know how you got it to work. Very very carefully :-) I had two consoles open, in one I did:

sleep 2m && reboot and in the other I tried it. That gave me a clean reboot option every time X hang. Aside from that I did nothing fancy. Downloaded the driver installer, used it to build an rpm for SUSE 10.1, installed that, built the driver, rebooted into runlevel 3 (just to make sure I don't have the older fglrx.ko loaded, and ran sax2. I had to add two lines to the xorg.conf to make XV work properly, but aside from that it's standard. Attached is my xorg.conf. Be aware that my resolution is probably different - I don't have the wide screen. Hans

On Sunday 03 September 2006 16:23, ken wrote:

Clayton wrote:

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...

....

I told him to buy an nVidia card.... and he bought an ATI :-( I've never seen an ATI work right... sigh..

I've been using ATI cards with Linux since 1992 and they've always worked great for me.

Well yes, but RECENT ati cards need proprietary driver. I think somewhere around the 9800 series they became proprietary. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen

On Sunday 03 September 2006 17:50, ken wrote:

John Andersen wrote:

...

On Sunday 03 September 2006 16:23, ken wrote:

...

Clayton wrote:

...

...

....

I told him to buy an nVidia card.... and he bought an ATI :-( I've never seen an ATI work right... sigh..

I've been using ATI cards with Linux since 1992 and they've always worked great for me.

Well yes, but RECENT ati cards need proprietary driver.

The issue was whether ATI cards work with Linux. I know firsthand they do. In fact, I'm running one right now and haven't had a problem with it. Sax should work as well as the ATI cards.

Yes, I understand that. But if he JUST purchased it, its probably new enough to require the proprietary drivers, which are available but Not necessarily bundled. The installation becomes different and somewhat more problematic than you are used to. The ATI cards I have used have worked since SuSE 7.1, but then the chipset is the 7900, not the newer ones. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen

Hans du Plooy wrote:

On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 17:54 -0800, John Andersen wrote:

...

...

The issue was whether ATI cards work with Linux. I know firsthand they do. In fact, I'm running one right now and haven't had a problem with it. Sax should work as well as the ATI cards. Yes, I understand that. But if he JUST purchased it, its probably new enough to require the proprietary drivers, which are available but Not necessarily bundled.

The ATI driver I needed *was* bundled with Suse 9.3. If a driver is available but isn't bundled with the distribution, this is a question to ask the distributor and doesn't reflect on ATI.

...

The installation becomes different and somewhat more problematic than you are used to.

(1) This depends on what "you are used to" is. (2) This mailing list operates quite differently from what I'm used to and, for many, problematic, but all you need to do is change your email client. :) (Let's talk about that again.) Cowboys like when things are inconvenient. And there seems to be ever more cowboys. (3) Before buying a machine to run Linux on (or any other OS), check to make sure that the components support the OS. (4) ATI's web site has *very* thorough documentation on installing and upgrading their drivers.

Exactly like nVidia. Better even, because it's only the newer cards that need the driver. With nVidia it's *all* their cards, and to make matters worse, they've dropped support for their older cards from the driver.

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The ATI cards I have used have worked since SuSE 7.1, but then the chipset is the 7900, not the newer ones.

The ones after 7x00 do work. Load the driver, just like you would do with nVidia, and it will work.

The biggest problem seems to be Sax2 having trouble with it. On all my machines it misdetects the screen properties. This is not the driver's fault, I haven't experienced the same problem in other distros.

Same here. Is, however, the problem really just with Suse? I get a wrong card designation with lspci. This isn't Suse-specific. I don't know... is the problem with sax or is it some other app/utility which sax is calling? More importantly, why is it taking so long to fix this? (I reported this problem a year ago.) ken