General Procedure to get ATI/DRI card running?

[Arc Riley]

Thats an r500 based card, so older Xorg versions don't support even 2d on
it.  Keep in mind r500/r600 support (even 2D) is new as of only a few months
ago, since AMD released the specs, so you'll need to upgrade quite a few
packages including xorg server, xlib, and Mesa.

I can't advise on how to go about upgrading since I'm completely unfamiliar
with "Scientific Linux" but based on your xorg server version I'm willing to
bet the rest of your packages are extremely out of date.  You may want to
consider (yea I realize it's a pain) migrating to a different distro, it may
be more work to manually compile/install the upgraded Xorg than it'd be to
install a whole new system.

After that, you'll want to install the "radeonhd" driver being developed by
AMD and Novell.  It's free software and has decent support for the r500
series.  Instructions and more details:

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

The standard "radeon" driver in more recent Xorg/dri versions supports 2D on
r500/r600 so once you get that updated you'll at least be able to use a GUI
to go through the above steps.


On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 5:19 PM, Labitt, Bruce <labittb1 at tycoelectronics.com>
wrote:

> I just got an ATI/AMD Radeon X1650 Pro video card to try to replace the
> onboard video on a Dell Optiplex 745 running Scientific Linux 5.1.
>
> So I just plugged the Radeon in and started the computer.  Um, during
> boot it said - "Oh no, you don't want to do that... You've got too many
> video sources for your monitor... Unplug one and start over."  So I did.
> Everything was fine until the OS tried to start X.  Then everything
> died.  I got a couple of options to look at.  An error message came up
> and said it could not find a video card.  Of course, I don't know how I
> could have read anything on the screen, if it did not find the card, but
> I digress.  It said I could fix things if I were root, so I dutifully
> complied.  As soon as I became root it tried and failed to start x.  It
> then said, "hey, I'm brilliant, why don't I probe stuff and generate a
> new x.conf file?"  The screen turned pretty colors for a while and
> eventually froze.  After a while, (many minutes) I reset the computer.
>
> So I currently have xorg-x11-server 1.1-48.41.el5-2.1
>
> What do I need to do to 1) get X to even start. 2) run 2D 3) run 3D.
> The computer is back to running on the intel chipset for now.
>
> Do I need to update the above file?  There does not appear to be an
> update in the repository.  I don't mind compiling stuff, having compiled
> octave, lapack, blas, and a few other packages.  However, having not
> done this adventure before (os video) I don't know what the order of
> steps should be.
>
> There was nothing on the SL site on video upgrades, although they did
> have proprietary drivers with no instructions on how to install.
>
> I'd like to go with OS / DRI if at all possible.
>
> Without belaboring this further, a couple of steps, or a general
> procedure would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> -Bruce
>
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