On Monday 19 October 2009 02:47:43 pm Robert P. J. Day wrote:
i've been fighting with this for the last couple hours, and i'm finally giving up and asking for help.
i installed a fresh suse 11 (yes, it's SLES 11 but i have to think this is going to be a general problem since it involves video drivers, but i'm willing to be corrected.) this is on a gateway mx7120 laptop, with a 1280x800 display, and the following snippet from "lspci -v":
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) <snip> short question: anyone know what the problem is?
Yes, and hopefully yes, the "black screen of death" means that your radeon.ko, (or radeonhd.ko, or fglrx.ko) isn't being loaded. giving your the screen init failure below. As root, try loading the modules and see which one works. If you are trying to load the fglrx.ko modules, first make sure there are no lingering "radeon" drivers loaded (if so, then rmmod radeon), then just install the module with "modprobe -v fglrx" and see if you get errors (they usually give you a hint). If you don't have errors after the load with modprobe, then confirm that whatever modules you were loading -- got loaded. Use "lsmod | grep modulename" to find out. Also, when dealing with kernel modules (somefile.ko), to load the module, you do NOT type the '.ko' at the end. So if your want to load "somemodule.ko", then your install it with modprobe (as root) giving only: modprobe summodule If you get the desired module loaded, REBOOT. I wouldn't want left over pieces of the old radeon or ATI driver laying around giving you trouble. The stock radeon driver is notorious for that. Also google "download radeonhd" and check whether you can use the radeonhd driver. It is far superior to the stock radeon driver for performance, but nothing will come close to a properly installed fglrx driver as far as performance goes. The 8-9 driver provides 600% better performance than the radeon or radeonhd driver. (The radeonhd driver is under very active development and it is getting better all the time. Good Luck!
more info: when i boot normally (for which X fails), then ssh in, the tail end of /var/log/Xorg.0.log reads:
Fatal server error: AddScreen/ScreenInit failed for driver 0
so it's pretty clear *something* failed badly, and i've been googling on that error to see if i can learn something obvious.
That looks just like an "I can't find my module" behavior that I've seen on a number of occastions.
i attached the system's xorg.conf file, which i find curious since i didn't change it at all, and it defines a number of modelines, *none* of which match the actual display res of 1280x800.
Here is one thing to try. Xorg has perfectly good defaults to get you going. Just move your xorg.conf somewhere safe to keep while testing. The with the xorg.conf REMOVED from /etc/X11, just try and start X again. I have seen this approach work in a majority of cases (however, it still reqires you to have the correct modules loaded.
i'm not a video expert so i'm stumped here, and open to suggestions. i've had issues with radeon drivers under fedora for a while -- should i expect the same grief under SUSE?
Very few are. But I guarantee you will learn enought of the life of your laptop to be considered an expert :-)
rday --
======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.
Web page: http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday ========================================================================
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