General Procedure to get ATI/DRI card running?

[Labitt, Bruce]

________________________________

From: Arc Riley [mailto:arcriley at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 5:49 PM
To: Labitt, Bruce
Cc: gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
Subject: Re: General Procedure to get ATI/DRI card running?

 

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I'm willing to bet the rest of your packages are extremely out of date.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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[Labitt, Bruce] 

 

Thanks Arc.  Scientific Linux is based on RHEL 5.1.  At this point I
have a bit invested in the distro, too much stuff compiled for it.  It
is somewhat recent - about as recent as RH 5.1.  No it isn't like FC9,
but the support for it is longer too.  In any case, first I'd like to
take a look at finding more current xorg.  

 

xorg is not particularly simple to figure out what to do.  They point
you to a directory full of directories.  No giant tarball, just a
million little ones.  I found a link to downloading cvs of xorg.
Slightly scary.  I'll look at it some more tomorrow and decide what to
do.

 

Regards,

Bruce

 

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