Distorted screen: Evo N610c w/ Ati Radeon Mobility M7 & Xfree 4.2

[Ashwin van Rooijen]

I have the exact same problem on my Evo N610c. It has an ATI Radeon Mobility M7 graphics card with 32 MB (DDR); I running Redhat 8 w/ XFree 4.2.

When the (gdm) login screen appears, it is distorted - this continues to be the case when I launch KDE or Gnome. It only disappears when I connect an external monitor. When I use Fn + F4 to switch to the external monitor and then back to the laptop panel, everything is solved; but without the external monitor and the switching there seems to be no way to get rid of the distortion.
My external monitor's OSD tells me that the gdm/login screen is displayed at 91 Hz(!!), which is way to much for my laptop panel. That explains why the laptop panel doesn't display X correctly, but how can I change this refresh rate? Changing the monitor's vertical refresh rates to "60 - 61Hz" in xf86config didn't work.

Switching to the vesa driver solves everything but this is notably slower and doesn't display video (DVD, DivX using Xine) correctly.

Any suggestions? Help appreciated.

[Stuart Browne]

Unfortunately, I've not had the opportunity to play with a N610c, only a N1020v, but I've not seen such a problem.

I don't suppose we could get you to send your /etc/X11/XF86Config file here so we can have a look over it?

[Ashwin van Rooijen]

Thanks for your reply. I could post my XF86Config, but I'm pretty syre there's nothing wrong with it.

The problem appears to be in the radeon driver in XFree 4.2.0; I've just installed the 4.2.99-901 snapshot of XFree and now everything runs just fine!

I hope the 4.3.0 will be out soon; it was expected by the end of january.

[Stuart Browne]

*nod* fair 'nuff.

I don't have a 610c to try things on, only a 1020v (and it's using RH8 and the 'vesa' driver) without issues, so..

[Georg Luebeck]

Have you tried to shut the lid of the laptop, and open again? Does the distortion then go away?

Things to try:
In your XF86Config-4 turn off DRI (direct rendering) and go down to 16 bpp depth.

Use my XF86Config-4. It works with the Xfree86 4.2. driver. You need also some other things to get powermanagement to work. See my reply to the query by Stephan Merz 02/07/03 in the Linux/general help queue.

Hope that helps.