Re: ATI Rage Mobility under FC2 (Re: Mozilla problem after upgrading to FC2)

I've joined the list to jump in and report my experiences with ATI Rage Mobility under FC2.

I've got a Dell Inspiron 7500 with an ATI RAGE Mobility P/M AGP 2x, and it's been a real hassle with FC2. The failure of the ati driver to function froze my machine at boot when attempting to start the gui/gdm, and starting either manually from runlevel 3 was a complete failure -- blank screen only -- till I found the workaround described below.

I haven't tried any of the solutions described in thread http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-May/msg05641.html
(FC2 - Xorg + AT Rage problem), such as reducing color depth to 8, using the vga driver in xorg.conf, or disabling DRI, but I have my own workaround.

I found that enabling the framebuffer at boot with something like vga=0x31A lets me use either the "ati" driver or "fbdev" in my xorg.conf, with 16 bit color at 1400x1050 (other dimensions, as well). Incidentally, Dell's documentation on this machine suggests that it is essentially pointless to run this laptop at anything greater than 16 bit color depth.

Here are relevant sections from my xorg.conf (ignore typos, it's copied by hand).

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
# Can use either ati or fbdev with vesafb enabled at boot
	Driver  "ati"
#	Driver  "fbdev"
	VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
	BoardName  "ATI Rage Mobility P"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier  "Screen0"
	Device  "Videocard0"
	Monitor  "Monitor0"
	DefaultDepth  "16"
	SubSection  "Display"
		Viewport  0 0
		Depth  16
		Modes  "1400x1050"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

I have installed on another partition on the same machine Debian testing, running XFree86 4.3.0.1. Under that installation, the "ati" driver works fine without any workaround (under bot kernel 2.4.x and 2.6.6), and furthermore, performance is much better than under FC2 - even if I enable the framebuffer in Debian as well.

Definitely looks like an xorg problem, but I would be very interested to hear any theories on why my workaround works..

Peter Yellman

William Hooper wrote:

Please send replies to the list.

Charles E Taylor IV said:

On Wed, 26 May 2004 20:53:35 -0400 (EDT)
"William Hooper" <whooperhsd3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Looking at my Xorg.0.log:

(--) PCI:*(1:0:0) ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility P/M AGP 2x rev 100
[snip]
(==) ATI(0): Chipset:  "ati".
(**) ATI(0): Depth 16, (--) framebuffer bpp 16

I've got a Dell Latitude CPx.

Do you have 3D acceleration with Fedora Core 2?

Haven't bothered to try.