More on ATI radeon graphics

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Husse

More on ATI radeon graphics

Post by Husse »

This is written from recent experience when I changed monitor from a 1280x1024 to a 1920x1080 both LCD and on DVI on a Radeon 3850
That was a nightmare, made worse by my stupidity to try dual monitors with these two
For some reason the new large wide screen monitor* kept the resolution of the old monitor and refused to change, and when it finally did change my dual monitor experiment brought it back to the "old" resolution
I realized that the only (?) way was to add Modes 1920x1080 to subsection Display in xorg.conf
I tried first to do only that to see what happened, and nothing happened as I expected
The ATI proprietary driver "fglrx" does not read xorg.conf at all which was confirmed
But you can add configuration items to xorg.conf and get them used and here is how
You need to work a bit in the terminal. Start with

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sudo aticonfig --initial
This changes xorg.conf considerably and it seemed that it left some sections that are not used any more. If you know xorg.conf very well it is worth editing those out
Next make your change - this must be done as root so

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gksu gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
(for non gnome it can be kdesudo kate or gksu mousepad)
The change you are most likely to do is to add a fix to get the right resolution like I had to
The --initial command created a SubSection "Display" if it did not exist already
I added
Modes "1920x1080"
to SubSection "Display"
You add of course your resolution
Now it's time to make fglrx use this

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sudo aticonfig --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf --tls=1
After this you better reboot, just restarting X may not be enough - in fact I have had to reboot twice on several occasions before things were as they should again
The --input command makes a change to the amdpcsb file which holds all settings for fglrx including the settings from amdcccle - that is the "ATI Catalyst Control Center"
So if you need to run that as root (I think it tells you that is necessary for something) you would need to run gksu or kdesudo amdcccle
Here are two useful links
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1074593
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI
The archlinux wiki is the best but archlinux is different from Ubuntu-based distributions so it is somewhat hard to interpret if you are less experienced
I never managed to get dual monitors to work with fglrx in Gloria so I purged it and use the open source driver now - works fine apart from Compiz not working
In Helena it just worked - I may have had some error in my Gloria setup
Edit - it seems that the fglrx for Gloria does not want to play nice.
If that is because of some config file residue I'm not aware of or a more general error I don't know

* Monitors are really cheap today - the new 23 inch monitor only cost the equivalent of about 185 Euro Possibly monitors will never be as cheap again
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
Stealing_Lillies

Re: More on ATI radeon graphics

Post by Stealing_Lillies »

Your like a machine husse - great post ty...
fattest

Re: More on ATI radeon graphics

Post by fattest »

i'm having a problem setting up the driver for an old computer with a radeon 7000 running mint 9. i get the following error

karim-desktop ~ # lspci | grep -i vga
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV100 QY [Radeon 7000/VE]
karim-desktop ~ # aticonfig --initial
aticonfig: No supported adapters detected

when I try to run catalyst control center I get a similar error. what driver should i be using?
telenux
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Re: More on ATI radeon graphics

Post by telenux »

The Radeon 7000 card in your computer is only supported by the open source radeon driver. ATI/AMD website lists the supported cards for the binary driver while some sites like X.org wiki w/ Radeon driver lists that card and what else is supported via the open source driver.

http://www.x.org/wiki/radeon

It should work out of the box although you might have to confirm whether the required firmware (non-free) is installed.
fattest

Re: More on ATI radeon graphics

Post by fattest »

thanks. i tried several drivers, ati, radeon, and fglrx, but the performance was pretty poor for all of them. youtube would crash firefox in full screen and was very choppy in regular size. i gave up for now until i find another agp card for this box.
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