problems with Ati Radeon 320m & Linux Red Hat 9

[roberto_58]

Hi, I???m italian student.

I have bought a notebook Compaq Presario 2100 (model N: 2156EA) but I cannot inastall graphic environment of Red Hat 9 (kernel 2.4.20-8) because X server(XFree86 4.3.0) don't accept my ATI Radeon 320M card and my TFT monitor.
Please, help me. Many thanks in advance for your support.

Ciao, Roberto

[Claudio Cilloni]

Maybe this Radeon card isn't yet supported by XFree 4.3. You can look at the hardware compatibility list at RedHat site www.redhat.com (go for Support&Docs).

I think you should be able to start X in 1024x768, 256 colors. It isn't good, but still usable.

Ciao
Claudio

[Regis Boudin]

Hi,

For your information, the ATI Radeon IGP 320M and 340M will be supported by the ati driver in the next XFree86 release (probably 4.4 I guess). If you can't wait, there are 2 solutions :

-compile a devel snapshop, it is what I did for a while, but I had issues with with packages
-use the vesa driver. It is what I currently use, even though the display is a little slower than with the ati driver.

Another possibility could be to try forcing the ChipID of the IGP to one known by the driver. However, this solution was really unstable for me.

The TFT monitor should not be a problem.

Regards

Regis

[Michael Mefford]

check this page out...

http://www.cybersym.com/pages/linux-ze4100.html

for now the ati radeon 320m can be used with some tweaking...basically you only have to do the following:

add the "device" section of the radeon_device.txt file to the /etc/X11/XF86Config file...

do not remove the vesa device section...

replace the "screen" section with the "screen" section of the radeon_device.txt file...

i must tell you, however, that this is optimized for the pavillion laptop using the ati radeon moblility 320m...also, after you've added this stuff, DO NOT change the hardware acceleration setting for the display in kde or gnome, no matter what!...don't turn it on or off...if you do, you'll lose the xserver for good and have to reload linux to get it back...

i do have rh9 successfully running a pavillion ze4115 with this setup...let me know if you have any questions and what happens...

michael.