Cant get the radeon driver to work at all on Kubuntu 8.10

[havok1977]

Hello, i just installed a fresh Kubuntu distro on ly laptop, and neither the installer nor the actual X server are able to get my GPU to work properly, my card is a:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M9+ 5C61 [Radeon Mobility 9200 (AGP)] (rev 01)

Currently i can only log in with the generic 'vesa' driver with a meager 800x600 resolution; when i just try to change the driver in my xorg.conf file and start up the X server all i get is a black screen that wont even allow me to fall back to a console and i must hard boot, so no way of cheching the logs either.

Im thinking maybe this is a problem with the default Ubuntu Kernel? I had this working just fine on my in-house compiled vanilla kernel before a crash forced me to format.

Trying to update to the PPA's xorg video drivers has not helped either.


Any help will be appreciated

[agd5f]

Sounds like it might be AGP related. Try adding:
Option "AGPMode" "1"
to the device section of your config. If that doesn't work, try disabling the DRI:
Option "DRI" "False"

[havok1977]

If that doesn't work, try disabling the DRI:
Option "DRI" "False"

Thanks! This helped me.

I can now log in with full resolution, but I wonder why is DRI not working? It was fine a couple of weeks ago; does this mean the hardware is no longer fully supported for DRI and therefore no more Compiz?

[agd5f]

Thanks! This helped me.

I can now log in with full resolution, but I wonder why is DRI not working? It was fine a couple of weeks ago; does this mean the hardware is no longer fully supported for DRI and therefore no more Compiz?

The DRI should still work fine. As I said, try AGP options:
Option "AGPMode" "X"
Where X = 1 or 2 or 4 or 8.

[havok1977]

The DRI should still work fine. As I said, try AGP options:
Option "AGPMode" "X"
Where X = 1 or 2 or 4 or 8.

Thanks again,

I wasn't aware that this parameter could go as high as 8 (1, 2 and 4 were a no go); so 8 was what finally got things working for me.

Cheers!

And in case anyone has the same hardware; I can only get desktop effects to work when i configure xorg's DefaultDepth parameter at 16 bits; with 24 it just wont work...

[agd5f]

Can you pastebin the output of lspci -vn and your xorg log so I can add a quirk for your card/motherboard combo so you don't have to add this option in the future?

[havok1977]

Can you pastebin the output of lspci -vn and your xorg log so I can add a quirk for your card/motherboard combo so you don't have to add this option in the future?

Thanks for that,

lspci -nv:

http://pastebin.com/m52f3cc04


/var/log/Xorg.0.log: (on 24 bits)

http://pastebin.com/m738a1372

[agd5f]

thanks. pushed!

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