[gentoo-user] ATI X trouble, again

[gentoo-user] ATI X trouble, again

[Alex Schuster]

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

Re: [gentoo-user] ATI X trouble, again

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 5:15 AM, Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org> wrote:
> 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
>
>

Hi Wonko,
   I have a couple of old Asus Pundit-R machines that I use for MythTV
frontends which had the same sort of problems - a specific ATI VGA
9100 IGP design built into the chipset and I needed TVout to drive the
TVs. I was stuck with very old kernels and an old ATI fglrx driver
made even more difficult as the Gentoo maintainers dropped everything
I was using from portage and I had to build my own overlays. It was a
mess.

   I did recently manage to get things running with new software and
the Open Source radeon driver. Maybe some of this will help you and
your friend. Feel free to contact me off-list if you need to.

   A couple of things to note:

1) I've never done any hal specific modifications on any of my machines.
2) You must choose an 800x600 default resolution for the Open Source
TVout logic to work as that's the only one they implemented.
3) If it matters my TVout is S-video

Hope this helps,
Mark

myth12 ~ # uname -a
Linux myth12 2.6.29-gentoo-r5 #6 PREEMPT Mon Jul 20 13:11:33 PDT 2009
i686 Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.26GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
myth12 ~ #

myth12 ~ # emerge -pv xorg-server xf86-video-ati xf86-input-evdev

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies ... done!
[ebuild   R   ] x11-base/xorg-server-1.6.3.901-r2  USE="hal ipv6 nptl
sdl xorg -debug -dmx -kdrive -minimal -tslib" 0 kB
[ebuild   R   ] x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-6.12.4  USE="-debug" 0 kB
[ebuild   R   ] x11-drivers/xf86-input-evdev-2.2.5  USE="-debug" 0 kB

Total: 3 packages (3 reinstalls), Size of downloads: 0 kB
myth12 ~ #

myth12 ~ # lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon 9100 IGP Host Bridge (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon 9100 IGP AGP Bridge
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc OHCI USB Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc OHCI USB Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc EHCI USB Controller (rev 01)
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc SMBus (rev 1a)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc Dual Channel Bus Master
PCI IDE Controller
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Device 434c
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP200 3COM 3C920B Ethernet Controller
00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP150 AC'97
Audio Controller (rev 01)
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon 9100 IGP
02:08.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3Com 3C920B-EMB-WNM
Integrated Fast Ethernet Controller (rev 40)
02:0a.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306 Fire II
IEEE 1394 OHCI Link Layer Controller (rev 80)
02:0c.0 CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc CB-710/2/4 Cardbus
Controller (rev 02)
02:0c.1 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc CB710 Memory Card Reader Controller
myth12 ~ #

myth12 ~ # cat /etc/make.conf
# These settings were set by the catalyst build script that
automatically built this stage
# Please consult /etc/make.conf.example for a more detailed example
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=i686 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
LIRC_DEVICES="streamzap"
VIDEO_CARDS="radeon mesa fbdev vesa"
INPUT_DEVICES="evdev"
PORTAGE_NICENESS=19
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--with-bdeps y"
USE="-X -jack -arts -apm -esd -cups -samba -i8x0 caps nptl nptlonly
audiofile ppds usb alsa cdr dvd dvdr dvdread mmx sse sse2 tcltk
sndfile flac lirc mjpeg threads "
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.osuosl.org/ "
SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
myth12 ~ #


myth12 ~ # cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "Module"

    Load        "dbe"   # Double buffer extension
    SubSection  "extmod"
      Option    "omit xfree86-dga"   # don't initialise the DGA extension
    EndSubSection

# This loads the GLX module
#    Load       "glx"
# This loads the DRI module
#    Load       "dri"

EndSection

Section "Files"

    FontPath   "/usr/share/fonts/misc/"
    FontPath   "/usr/share/fonts/100dpi/"
    FontPath   "/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"

EndSection


Section "InputDevice"

    Identifier  "Keyboard1"
    Driver      "kbd"

    Option "AutoRepeat" "500 30"

    Option "XkbRules"   "xorg"
    Option "XkbModel"   "pc101"
    Option "XkbLayout"  "us"

EndSection

Section "InputDevice"

    Identifier  "Mouse1"
    Driver      "mouse"
    Option "Protocol"    "Auto" # Auto detect
    Option "Device"      "/dev/input/mice"
    Option "ZAxisMapping"   "4 5 6 7"

EndSection

Section "Monitor"

    Identifier  "My Monitor"
    Option      "PreferredMode" "800x600"
    HorizSync   31.5 - 57.0
    VertRefresh 50-90

EndSection


Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Standard VGA"
    VendorName  "Unknown"
    BoardName   "Unknown"
    Driver     "vga"
EndSection


Section "Device"
    Identifier  "** ATI Radeon (generic)               [radeon]"
    Driver      "radeon"
    Option      "ForceTVOut" "on"
    Option      "TVDACLoadDetect" "TRUE"
    Option      "TVStandard" "ntsc"
    Option      "monitor-S-video" "TV-monitor"
EndSection


Section "Screen"
    Identifier  "Screen 1"
    Device      "** ATI Radeon (generic)               [radeon]"
    Monitor     "My Monitor"
    DefaultDepth        24

    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       8
        Modes       "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        ViewPort    0 0
    EndSubsection
    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       16
        Modes       "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        ViewPort    0 0
    EndSubsection
    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       24
        Modes       "800x600"
        ViewPort    0 0
    EndSubsection
EndSection


Section "ServerLayout"

    Identifier  "Simple Layout"
    Screen "Screen 1"
    InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
    InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"

EndSection

# Section "DRI"
#    Mode 0666
# EndSection

myth12 ~ #


myth12 ~ # rc-update show
           alsasound |      default
            bootmisc | boot
             checkfs | boot
           checkroot | boot
               clock | boot
         consolefont | boot
                dbus |      default
                hald |      default
            hostname | boot
             keymaps | boot
               lircd |      default
               local |      default nonetwork
          localmount | boot
             modules | boot
            net.eth0 |      default
              net.lo | boot
            netmount |      default
                ntpd |      default
           rmnologin | boot
                sshd |      default
           syslog-ng |      default
             urandom | boot
          vixie-cron |      default
myth12 ~ #

Re: [gentoo-user] ATI X trouble, again

[Alex Schuster]

Mark Knecht writes:

> On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 5:15 AM, Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>
> wrote:

>    I have a couple of old Asus Pundit-R machines that I use for MythTV
> frontends which had the same sort of problems - a specific ATI VGA
> 9100 IGP design built into the chipset and I needed TVout to drive the
> TVs. I was stuck with very old kernels and an old ATI fglrx driver
> made even more difficult as the Gentoo maintainers dropped everything
> I was using from portage and I had to build my own overlays. It was a
> mess.

At least that makes me feel not so alone :)

>    I did recently manage to get things running with new software and
> the Open Source radeon driver. Maybe some of this will help you and
> your friend. Feel free to contact me off-list if you need to.

Thanks for the offer!

>    A couple of things to note:
> 
> 1) I've never done any hal specific modifications on any of my machines.

Neither did I. I have it enabled now, while at first I had trouble and 
compiled xorg-server without support for it. My keyboard and mouse are still 
configured in xorg.conf, because I want the german layout and activate a 
composite key, and I do not want to learn how to configure this the HAL way 
(seems like HAL is in the process of being dropped anyway).

> 2) You must choose an 800x600 default resolution for the Open Source
> TVout logic to work as that's the only one they implemented.
> 3) If it matters my TVout is S-video

Thanks for the information. However, I did not try anything with TV-out yet, 
since I do not get any output on the primary screen. Did you also have 
trouble with that?


> Section "Device"
>     Identifier  "** ATI Radeon (generic)               [radeon]"
>     Driver      "radeon"
>     Option      "ForceTVOut" "on"
>     Option      "TVDACLoadDetect" "TRUE"
>     Option      "TVStandard" "ntsc"
>     Option      "monitor-S-video" "TV-monitor"
> EndSection

Great, I will need those once I get the primary display to work.

	Wonko

Re: [gentoo-user] ATI X trouble, again

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 7:09 AM, Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org> wrote:
> Mark Knecht writes:
<SNIP>
>
>> 2) You must choose an 800x600 default resolution for the Open Source
>> TVout logic to work as that's the only one they implemented.
>> 3) If it matters my TVout is S-video
>
> Thanks for the information. However, I did not try anything with TV-out yet,
> since I do not get any output on the primary screen. Did you also have
> trouble with that?
>

The machine is hooked to the TV so I did all my debugging using the TV
and never used a normal monitor at all. On these machine I have to
choose a specific output - TV or monitor - in BIOS. My experience with
these Asus machines is the Phoenix BIOS didn't do a good job of
auto-selecting which output to use and I didn't want to confuse things
as my needs are TV only. I think I tried a monitor once, probably got
a blank screen, and then gave up and just used the TV from there on.

In your friend's case, if she's using a monitor sometimes and a TV
sometimes, then that's beyond my experience on these boxes and you are
unfortunately more on your own. I know the machine will drive a
monitor - I have a 3rd that I use that way - but I've not had luck
getting it to switch back and forth on command, although I haven't
tried very hard.

Good luck,
Mark

Re: [gentoo-user] ATI X trouble, again

[Jesús Guerrero]

Each time you reinstall the driver (fglrx) for some reason, be sure you do
"eselect opengl set ati" again, even if the ebuild says it's doing it for
you. I've been hit by that dozens of times. Can't be sure if it's your
problem but it might worth a try.

Besides that, if you have both installed, make sure (using lsmod) that
only fglrx OR radeon+drm is loaded, and that it matches the one in your
xorg.conf. Otherwise funny things will happen.
-- 
Jesús Guerrero

[gentoo-user] Re: ATI X trouble, again

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 10/23/2009 03:15 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:
>
> 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.

For the radeon X driver (which *is* the best choice for the X1000 
series) make sure you also have radeon in-kernel support enabled.

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ATI X trouble, again

[Alex Schuster]

Nikos Chantziaras writes:

> On 10/23/2009 03:15 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> For the radeon X driver (which *is* the best choice for the X1000
> series) make sure you also have radeon in-kernel support enabled.

It is enabled, and according do dmesg, it is running fine:

[  387.433698] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
[  387.535673] [drm] Initialized radeon 1.30.0 20080528 for 0000:02:00.0 on 
minor 0

But that's only for GLX, right? So even if it weren't enabled, I should see 
something, I guess.

	Wonko

[gentoo-user] Re: ATI X trouble, again

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 10/23/2009 06:47 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:
> Nikos Chantziaras writes:
>
>> On 10/23/2009 03:15 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> For the radeon X driver (which *is* the best choice for the X1000
>> series) make sure you also have radeon in-kernel support enabled.
>
> It is enabled, and according do dmesg, it is running fine:
>
> [  387.433698] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
> [  387.535673] [drm] Initialized radeon 1.30.0 20080528 for 0000:02:00.0 on
> minor 0
>
> But that's only for GLX, right? So even if it weren't enabled, I should see
> something, I guess.

Can you post /var/log/Xorg.0.log on http://pastebin.ca ?

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ATI X trouble, again

[Alex Schuster]

Nikos Chantziaras writes:

> Can you post /var/log/Xorg.0.log on http://pastebin.ca ?

Config file and logs are already here: 
http://wonkology.org/~wonko/tmp/tanja/

	Wonko

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ATI X trouble, again

[Jesús Guerrero]

On Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:47:44 +0200, Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>
wrote:
> Nikos Chantziaras writes:
> 
>> On 10/23/2009 03:15 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:
>> > 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.
>> 
>> For the radeon X driver (which *is* the best choice for the X1000
>> series) make sure you also have radeon in-kernel support enabled.
> 
> It is enabled, and according do dmesg, it is running fine:
> 
> [  387.433698] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
> [  387.535673] [drm] Initialized radeon 1.30.0 20080528 for 0000:02:00.0
> on 
> minor 0
> 
> But that's only for GLX, right? So even if it weren't enabled, I should
> see 
> something, I guess.

Yes.

What kind of blank is it? Do you see the mouse pointer at least? Do the
monitor(s) stay on or do they go into standby mode? I've had issues with
radeon in the past, and after asking in the mailing list it seemed like
some issue with my AGP card. Some developer suggested to try this in the
xorg.conf file and it worked for me:

  Option      "BusType" "PCIE"

And yes, it's an AGP card. The logic behind this is out of my
understanding. You can see the thread here:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.freedesktop.xorg.drivers.ati/10628/match=i92guboj

If you have problems with the radeon (not fglrx or radeonhd) driver, I
suggest posting to that list. It's probably the best place to get help if
the standard procedures do not work.
-- 
Jesús Guerrero

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ATI X trouble, again

[Alex Schuster]

Jesús Guerrero writes:

> On Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:47:44 +0200, Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>
> wrote:

> What kind of blank is it? Do you see the mouse pointer at least? Do the
> monitor(s) stay on or do they go into standby mode?

The monitors complain about bad frequencies. The TFT then enters standby 
mode, the CRT continues trying to show something, but I only see the 
"frequency out of range" message.

> I've had issues with
> radeon in the past, and after asking in the mailing list it seemed like
> some issue with my AGP card. Some developer suggested to try this in the
> xorg.conf file and it worked for me:
> 
>   Option      "BusType" "PCIE"
> 
> And yes, it's an AGP card. The logic behind this is out of my
> understanding. You can see the thread here:
> 
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.freedesktop.xorg.drivers.ati/10628/ma
> tch=i92guboj

Tried that, but it did not help.

> If you have problems with the radeon (not fglrx or radeonhd) driver, I
> suggest posting to that list. It's probably the best place to get help if
> the standard procedures do not work.

Thanks! I will do that.

	Wonko

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ATI X trouble, again

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org> wrote:
> Jesús Guerrero writes:
>
>> On Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:47:44 +0200, Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>
>> wrote:
>
>> What kind of blank is it? Do you see the mouse pointer at least? Do the
>> monitor(s) stay on or do they go into standby mode?
>
> The monitors complain about bad frequencies. The TFT then enters standby
> mode, the CRT continues trying to show something, but I only see the
> "frequency out of range" message.
>
>> I've had issues with
>> radeon in the past, and after asking in the mailing list it seemed like
>> some issue with my AGP card. Some developer suggested to try this in the
>> xorg.conf file and it worked for me:
>>
>>   Option      "BusType" "PCIE"
>>
>> And yes, it's an AGP card. The logic behind this is out of my
>> understanding. You can see the thread here:
>>
>> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.freedesktop.xorg.drivers.ati/10628/ma
>> tch=i92guboj
>
> Tried that, but it did not help.
>
>> If you have problems with the radeon (not fglrx or radeonhd) driver, I
>> suggest posting to that list. It's probably the best place to get help if
>> the standard procedures do not work.
>
> Thanks! I will do that.
>
>        Wonko

BTW - EVERY problem I was having when I dealt with this sort of thing
a couple of months ago was visible in some sense in the Xorg.0.log
files. I would look for errors, figure out what was causing them,
mostly being config issues in my case, and then fix them and try
again. It really paid to sort of dig into that file and try to look
closely at every warning message along with the more obvious error
(EE) messages.

I also got help on the same ATI list you were pointed out. Very helpful folks.


Good luck,
Mark

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ATI X trouble, again

[Alex Schuster]

Mark Knecht writes:

> BTW - EVERY problem I was having when I dealt with this sort of thing
> a couple of months ago was visible in some sense in the Xorg.0.log
> files. I would look for errors, figure out what was causing them,
> mostly being config issues in my case, and then fix them and try
> again. It really paid to sort of dig into that file and try to look
> closely at every warning message along with the more obvious error
> (EE) messages.

There are only two (EE) errors about input devices, because I have them 
configured manually. The warnings:

(WW) RADEON(0): DRI init changed memory map, adjusting ...
(WW) RADEON(0):   MC_FB_LOCATION  was: 0xefffe000 is: 0xefffe000
(WW) RADEON(0):   MC_AGP_LOCATION was: 0x003f0000 is: 0xffffffc0
No idea what this is.

(WW) Open ACPI failed (/var/run/acpid.socket) (No such file or directory)
Probably harmless, I have this on my desktop system, too.

That's it.
Then I have some blank/disable messages I do not understand at the bottom. 
On my desktop system, where I at least got some unaccelerated X output with 
the radeon driver, I have some of them, but fewer.

Output CRT1 disable success
Blank CRTC 0 success
Disable CRTC 0 success
Blank CRTC 1 success
Disable CRTC 1 success
(II) RADEON(0): RADEONRestoreMemMapRegisters() : 
(II) RADEON(0):   MC_FB_LOCATION   : 0xefffe000 0xefffe000
(II) RADEON(0):   MC_AGP_LOCATION  : 0x003f0000
(II) RADEON(0): avivo_restore !
Enable CRTC 1 success
Unblank CRTC 1 success
Enable CRTC 0 success
Unblank CRTC 0 success
(WW) Open ACPI failed (/var/run/acpid.socket) (No such file or directory)
(II) No APM support in BIOS or kernel
(II) AIGLX: Resuming AIGLX clients after VT switch
Output CRT1 disable success
Output CRT2 disable success
Blank CRTC 0 success
Disable CRTC 0 success
Blank CRTC 1 success
Disable CRTC 1 success
Output CRT1 disable success
Blank CRTC 0 success
Disable CRTC 0 success
Mode 1280x1024 - 1688 1066 5
(II) RADEON(0): RADEONRestoreMemMapRegisters() : 
(II) RADEON(0):   MC_FB_LOCATION   : 0xefffe000 0xefffe000
(II) RADEON(0):   MC_AGP_LOCATION  : 0xffffffc0
freq: 135000000
best_freq: 135000000
best_feedback_div: 50
best_ref_div: 2
best_post_div: 5
(II) RADEON(0): crtc(0) Clock: mode 135000, PLL 135000
(II) RADEON(0): crtc(0) PLL  : refdiv 2, fbdiv 0x32(50), pdiv 5
Set CRTC 0 PLL success
Set CRTC Timing success
Set CRTC 0 Overscan success
Not using RMX
scaler 0 setup success
Set CRTC 0 Source success
crtc 0 YUV disable setup success
Output DAC1 setup success
Output CRT1 enable success
Enable CRTC 0 success
Unblank CRTC 0 success
Output CRT2 disable success
Blank CRTC 1 success
Disable CRTC 1 success
(II) RADEON(0): [RESUME] Attempting to re-init Radeon hardware.
(II) Configured Mouse: ps2EnableDataReporting: succeeded
(II) AIGLX: Suspending AIGLX clients for VT switch
Output CRT1 disable success
Blank CRTC 0 success
Disable CRTC 0 success
Blank CRTC 1 success
Disable CRTC 1 success
(II) RADEON(0): RADEONRestoreMemMapRegisters() : 
(II) RADEON(0):   MC_FB_LOCATION   : 0xefffe000 0xefffe000
(II) RADEON(0):   MC_AGP_LOCATION  : 0x003f0000
(II) RADEON(0): avivo_restore !
Enable CRTC 1 success
Unblank CRTC 1 success
Enable CRTC 0 success
Unblank CRTC 0 success
(II) UnloadModule: "mouse"
(II) UnloadModule: "kbd"
(II) RADEON(0): [drm] removed 1 reserved context for kernel
(II) RADEON(0): [drm] unmapping 8192 bytes of SAREA 0x1efff000 at 
0x7fe96dacf000
(II) RADEON(0): [drm] Closed DRM master.


> I also got help on the same ATI list you were pointed out. Very helpful
>  folks.

Thanks, I will go there.

	Wonko