ATI x1400 System Lockup Trouble - Open Source Driver

[Insane1]

Well...I've been afraid to come back to the world of Linux Mint and newer distros from SimplyMepis due to issues I've been unable to see being replicated...but given Linux Mint has always been nice to me (And I really REALLY wanna use it again...) I wanted to ask for support with an issue that has arisen for me in nearly all the recent distros (Ubuntu 9.04, and even Mandriva 2009.1, are affected). To note, I have what ATI apparently considers Legacy without proprietary driver support as my current graphic cards, so fglrx is out of the question (not sure why ATI can't just make the 9.3 catalyst compatible with the latest xorg...can't be that mind-bendingly expensive to at least support that). That card is an x1400 mobility radeon with 128mb. Normally, the radeon/ati open source drivers actually runs fairly well with this card, and gives me no problems. However, with Ubuntu 9.04, among others, my system will hard lock (sometimes to the point even the system request key doesn't work, so no REISUB recovery...) if anything of the graphical intensity of the lattice screensaver occurs. This has caused my system to lockup on games (oddly, games like OpenArena appear to be fine), certain screensavers, and SecondLife.

I've searched high and low for solutions, but as of yet I have not found any aside from switching to SimplyMepis to avoid the issue altogether. I'm more than willing to reinstall Linux Mint if anyone is willing to help me try to solve the issue, or knows the answer.

EDIT: I also noticed this may be in the wrong part of the hardware assistance part of the forum. If anyone sees this with the power to move it to the right part of the forum, feel free to do so, and I apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused.

...right now I'm really wishing I had a laptop with a changeable graphics card o.x

[richyrich]

ATI has come out with a new driver reported to fix the problems with Jaunty/Gloria.

Link found in this thread from yesterday: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=27813

Hope this helps, Richard

[Insane1]

ATI has come out with a new driver reported to fix the problems with Jaunty/Gloria.

Link found in this thread from yesterday: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=27813

Hope this helps, Richard

Unfortunately, this likely does not work. ATI dropped all support for cards x1900 and earlier (it's a pretty big complaint. Basically all the new catalyst drivers ONLY work with the HD-series cards), among other, for catalyst 9.4 and above.

Thanks for the suggestion, though.

[Insane1]

Hi there!

to Insane1 (or others with the ATI Mobility Radeon x1400 graphics card) I'm running Mint 7 and my problems were solved by installing the "radeonhd" package.
This is what I did to install the right driver. WARNING - I have to warn everybody (see below) as you might damage your system!

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd

restart and it might work! (it did for me) More info: http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd and cheers to them!!

They also list our precious (but dubious) ATI x1400 Mobility as supported (partly?)

WARNING It might also go horribly wrong, as i'm not very knowledgeable - you might not be able to boot back into Mint. If this happens try and hit the esc key, boot only into command line, log in as user and try

Code: Select all

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -p high xserver-xorg

you will have to write this down or remeber at least dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, as you might not be able start the desktop - sorry if I'm being overcomplete

I have succeeded in running SketchUp, a 3D app. using "Wine" and above fix!

I'm on an ACER Aspire 5672 Wlmi laptop with ATI X1400 Mobility Radeon graphics (slightly problematic)

bye

Wouter

Alright, I'll give that a try. I do have a quick question though...in the past, RadeonHD has never given good 3D accel at all (The ATI/Radeon driver provided at least that much, even if it lacked up-to-date shader support). Does the RadeonHD driver currently give you acceptable 3D acceleration in glxgears on your X1400? Also, thanks for replying. I'm glad I checked back to see if anyone else left any suggestions.

[Insane1]

I can confirm that radeonhd indeed fixes my issues except one. 3D acceleration doesn't work, and I tried multiple methods of enabling it...guess I'll switch to Linux Mint 6 for now and skip 7...I sure hope this doesn't carry over to 8. I guess it's better in the long run, though. I heard that when ATI discontinued it's cards, it also released a bunch of the hardware documentation, which should mean better 3D acceleration in Radeon and RadonHD (once all the issues are sorted out). Here's to looking forward to that happening!