X server incompatible with ATI driver...Pls help

[Vineeth Varghese]

Hi,

I have purchased a Compaq 2134AD laptop http://h50102.www5.hp.com/store/storeModel.asp?familyid=286&gna=Notebooks

The Display card is ATI Mobility Radeon 4X AGP
and in windows the driver is IGP 340M

When I installed RH8 on my system it detected most of my hardware except for my display driver. Now the general driver is picked due to which the screen size is small i.e. does fill the monitor..take only half of the space...

Can someone please advise me in this regard.

Thanks in advance,
Vineeth.

[Stuart Browne]

From what I recall about the various ATI Mobility chipsets, the version of XFree that comes with RH8 (4.2.0) doesn't have an appropriate driver for it.

RH9 comes with an updated XFree version (4.3.0) which has newer, and better support for the ATI Mobility chipsets, but I'm unsure whether the eratta updates for RH8 include these.

Suggestion at this point, update to RH9.

Either that, or manually update your XFree versions (www.xfree.org) to a newer build/version.

Over the past few months, I beleive there have been a number of posts in this newsgroup with regards to this issue.

[Jerome Henry]

I also remember solving this issue on rh8, by running redhat-config-Xfree86, and choosing another ATI card, but I don't remember which. It was a very close card on the list to the default suggested card by the system.
Not full 3D acceleration of course, but still full screen 24 bits colors...
Maybe could you give it a try...

J

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

I suggest you to focus on screen.What screen do you have?Try to run redhat-config-xfree86 and select the apropriate type of screen (your screen) and then you should be able to change the resolution.

[Vineeth Varghese]

I need some more clarifictions. First of all if I go for RH9 what should I select for my display device bcoz my machine config says "ATI Mobility Radeon 4X AGP" but in windows system properties is "IGP 340M".

What is the scree type?. With windows (and the config list)the only information is digital flat screen. How can I know the exact make etc..

Now Grub is my bootloader so will the advanced power saving features of WinXP work now.

[Patrick Van Humbeeck]

if you dont care for hardware acceleration (which is probably the case on a laptop) then you can just spare yourself the headache and run X in vesa framebuffer mode, that should work fine at higher resolutions too.

[Vineeth Varghese]

I am not at all bothered abt high graphic performance in Linux...(though it won't hurt to have something that I have paid for, working ;-) )

but the real headache is the display size which is half of my screen size

[Patrick Van Humbeeck]

maybe your laptop has a button to switch video modes too ? I know I have a Compaq Armada on which pressing the display switch button (I believe this is for tv out actually) causes the laptop's screen to switch between fullscreen and a tiny window (about 1/4th screen real estate) in the middle. but then it's another model and it's running gentoo linux so YMMV.

in any case running the card in framebuffer mode should allow you to go full screen without any specific driver, all it takes is to enable it in the kernel (probably done already) and passing an appropriate vga=X arg to your bootloader.

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

in order to know the type of youe video adapter :
1. you can phisically open your pc and look on the card.-tipically it's vendor name is written on it.
2. You can run devmgmt.msc utility to see the list of devices on your windows 2000,XP

For screen type -simply look at the screen -you should see it's type and model.Alternatively-see it's manual.

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

There is a small chance that your laptops drivers (and specially video driver isn't supported by your version of linux).
I highly recommend using the latest version of redhat -which is currently redhat9.

[Huc_1]

Can you run the command glxinfo from an X xterm
and post here perhap this will tell use more informations on your card, and from there perhap we could find more !

J-P

[Huc_1]

I also found that if I did a locate radeon on my Linux RH 9.0 there are some files and directory under/usr/src/linux-2.4.20-20.9/drivers/char/* that refer to radeon there is probably a module and/or kernel driver that one can include/load for radeon viedeo card ... in fact there is also a

# man radeon

last question do you see a very small screen also before you start x ?

J-P

[Jerome Henry]

To answer also some of your questions :
- The screen to select is standard laptop 1024x768 screen;
- You card says IGP 340M, because this is the driver Windows uses for many ATI Radeon cards. But your card is physically a RADEON, you'll find it under ATI section upon install.
- As Redhat 9 is more recent than 8.0, there a more chances that driver is adapted... The problem is that... you know, video card business is a war, and makers anounce features before they are really able to make them work... result is that some cards don't have on their chipset exactly the feature anounced... this is what make Linux support unsure. One often have to wait a later release where developpers for Linux implement real features instead of promised features...

J

[Vineeth Varghese]

Before start X I don't see any small screen but I see 3 distorted images of the login screen, side by side. Then it goes to the correct screen.

[Huc_1]

Oopps, Sorry
I forgot to ask for the
# cat /var/log/XFree86.0.log
from your X session this with other files could help us find/help futher if posible.

J-P (0 pts for this pls)

[Jerome Henry]

Hi
So are you turning to RH9, or do you want us to try to fix with rh8, which may come to a dead end ?

J

[Vineeth Varghese]

From all your replies and from some articles on the web I think turning to RH9 is the best available option which I am going to do. But I am still baffled at why the screen size is small with VESA.

[Vineeth Varghese]

I had one more question which I posted before "Now Grub is my bootloader so will the advanced power saving features of WinXP work now."


The reason I am asking this is when my laptop goes to standby from windows and when I restart I used to get the "Resuming Windows screen" but I don't after RH8 installation. Even though it is restarting correctly I am just wondering whether there could be any lingering effects due to this.

[Bruce Copeland]

Radeon IGP graphics systems, which are found on most of the recent Compaq and HP notebooks, are not well detected/configured by any of the currently available Linux distributions. You can sometimes get the graphical X config programs to work if you choose Generic Laptop Display 1024x768 and Generic vesa for the driver. For RH8, you generally need to manually configure your /etc/X11/XF86Config file. None of the distributions use the radeon drivers without some serious tweaking. BUT there are ways to make it all work--including 3D acceleration!!!. You can find out more on my Linux-ze4100 web page:

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

Advanced power saving features don't work on any of these notebooks without building/running a kernel that supports ACPI. The power saving features under Linux have nothing to do with the bootloader or Windows XP.

Bruce

[Jerome Henry]

This 'reasume' screen is, as Bruce writes, linked to your XP OS, not the boot loader. The difference now is that XP OS can write a 'going to sleep' info, that your NTLDR reads on coming back.
Now that you have grub, the going to sleep works as well, but NTLDR just can't pass to the right screen anymore, as NTLDR has been replace with GRUB. It doesn't affect the feature from XP side.
It's another point if you want to use it from Linux size, search on this side for ACPI, there were many questions on that during spring..

J

[Paulo A G Fessel]

I know that this may sound strange (or silly), but it seems that you haven't checked ATI's page on linux drivers itself.

Here's a link:

http://mirror.ati.com/support/products/workstation/mobilityfiregl/linux/mobilityfiregllinuxdrivers.html?type=linux&prodType=firegl∏=fireLinBedriver&submit.x=10&submit.y=10

Sure, these drivers aren't GPL but they are already packaged in rpm format.

Have you tried these?

Let us know.

Good luck,
Paulo Fessel

[Vineeth Varghese]

Thanks folks. I solved my display size problem with your help now I am going to upgrade to RH9.

I do have one more query. This is related to the touch pad of my laptop. I have this scroll facility on it which helps me scroll through long documents rather that using the pointer. Something like a mouse roll button. I hope I am clear :)

Ok this does seem to be working in RH8...will this get resolved when I move to RH9 or is do I have to apply a separate patch.

[Vineeth Varghese]

Correction to my previous query - My scroll is not working in Linux

[Huc_1]

In the reply/link of Bruce Copeland there is a section called Touchpad/Scrollpad wich may hold the answer to your question this could perhaps, also be applied in RH 9.0

Sorry I can be more specific I do not owne such a Touchpad.

Hope this helps

J-P

[Vineeth Varghese]

I did look that up for my scrollpad but couldn't really understand the changes in the X86Config file :-(