Timothy Murphy wrote:
Peter Yellman wrote:
I've joined the list to jump in and report my experiences with ATI Rage Mobility under FC2.
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).
What exactly do you mean by "something like vga=0x31A"? I tried adding this to my grub.conf ========================================= title Fedora Core (2.6.6) root (hd0,5) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.6 ro root=/dev/hda6 vga=0x31A initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.6.img ========================================= but it didn't seem to have any effect. Why exactly would that enable the framebuffer?
That's exactly what I mean. When I add that with the stock kernel distributed with FC2, or with a custom kernel built as per this section of the Framebuffer HOWTO http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Framebuffer-HOWTO-5.html#ss5.2 (a little out of date for 2.6 kernel building maybe), I get the penguin logo at boot, a 1280x1024 console (as per section http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Framebuffer-HOWTO-5.html#ss5.3), and various boot messages about vesafb being enabled.
It looks like you are using your own kernel, maybe you eliminated the framebuffer console options (need the penguin logo option too, for that, and maybe the ati agp stuff?).
I have no clue why this works, but it does -- with the stock FC2 kernel, and with a 2.6.6 kernel I built myself. One thing I know is different is that /dev/fb0 exists when booting with the vesafb, and doesn't when I don't. I really don't see this as a "fix", as performance is not as good as with the ati driver under Debian, and there can be serious screen artifacts after some period of use, but it's the best workaround I've found for my particular situation. Someone else apparently has tried this and had similar experience http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-May/msg07729.html. I am still very curious to hear an explanation of why this does work, though.
Peter Yellman
