[gentoo-user] ATI X trouble, again

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Hi there!

Now all this X stuff is becoming really annoying. I struggled for days to 
get it to work again after the upgrade to 1.6. I have a Radeon HD3200 and 
tried using fglrx, radeon, radeonhd, vesa, or no xorg.conf at all. I got a 
blank screen only and no apparent errors in the Xorg log. So it seems X was 
running fine, apart from having a blank screen.

I had similar problems when I started with this machine half a year ago. 
With every update of kernel, X or ati-drivers, I fear that my X will not 
work when I reboot. And half of the times this is true. For some three years 
before I had an old NVidia card, and experienced the same. But then I could 
just change driver from nvidia to nv and got X running, just without 
acceleration. What is quite annoying with my ATI card is that often I cannot 
go back to text mode then I try something new in my xorg.conf, and have to 
reboot. I know about Alt-SysRq-R, this works sometimes (but only once, not 
if I start X again), and sometimes it does not.

The good news is, that with 2.6.31-tuxonice and ati-drivers-9.9-r2 suddenly 
all is working perfectly. For this time, let's see what the next update will 
do.

But there is this machine of a friend which I just updated. She did not do 
this for about a year, mostly because she also had lots of troubles in 
configuring her X. She needs a working TV-out, which complicates things even 
more. And so she did not dare to change her working setup, I can understand 
this.

Now I upgraded the machine, which was some trouble, too, many blockers and 
such. That's done, all is perfectly fine I think. But I did that from 
remote, now I tried to start X. Guess what happened. No apparent errors with 
radeon, radeonhd or without xorg.conf, but the screen just goes blank, the 
TFT enters suspend mode. With vesa, X hangs so I cannot go back into text 
mode and have to reboot.
I replaced her TFT with a CRT monitor. Same result, whether I configure this 
monitor or not, when I start X it complains about bad frequencies.

I did not try ati-drivers. Her card is a RV505 (Radeon X1550 Series) which 
is no longer supported by current ati-drivers. Older drivers might still 
work for a while, but only with kernels < 2.6.29. And I suspect the problem 
is not the driver itself, because radeon does not work, too, and I also had 
similar problems of a blank screen with an ATI card and different drivers.

Today is her birthday, I intended to present her the updated PC with 
accelerated X and KDE4, but now she cannot use it at all.

Any idea what do to now? Apart from buying a new graphics adapter, which 
might work, or might not work. Or trying more monitors. The xorg.conf and 
some log files are here, in case someone wants to have a look:
http://wonkology.org/~wonko/tmp/tanja/

Thanks,
	Wonko