ATI onboard strikes back

Thursday, June 12th, 2008 by Marcin Juszkiewicz

As we plan to move from Poznań to Szczecin this week we are spending at Ania’s parents house.

To have better work equipment then my Dell D400 laptop I grabbed some unused components from home to build computer. The list was not so long:

  • 120GB ATA hard disk (it was system one some time ago)
  • DFI RS482 mainboard with 2.1GB ram and Athlon64 X2 cpu (my previous desktop)
  • cpu cooler
  • keyboard
  • PS/2 mouse (which I used before buying wireless one)
  • power supply
  • USB->Serial adapter and some other USB gadgets
  • some cables
  • headphones

The only thing which was needed to make it computer was case. And this shown that Szczecin lacks good computer shops — I had to visit 4 of them just to buy decent case as most of time they only had cheap ones.

Anyway I am using this machine for few days now (connected to old 17″ CRT which I used in 2006) with on-board ATI graphics card. It has many names… “RS485, ATI Radeon x1250 Chipset” etc… And this is crap never mind which drivers are used ;(

First I started with “xf86-video-ati” one. Version shipped in Debian ’sid’ (6.8.0) is very old and reports that I have the same monitor connected to VGA and DVI outputs. Result is not funny. Driver from “experimental” is much better. But 1024×768@85Hz resolution which is default is not so nice — 1280×1024@85Hz is much better but needs to be set by XRandR call or tweaking of X11 config file.

So I tried to use official ATI driver: “fglrx”. As usual it required patching to build with last release kernel (2.6.25) but patches are already in Debian so it took less time then my last fight with NVidia driver. Effect is also strange — this time monitor started in 2048×1536@60Hz which is just insane on 17″ CRT. After switching with XRandR to sane 1280×1024@85Hz it is much more usable.

Good side is that I do not need to use this machine too often so it will stay like it is for some time. When we move it will be one of my build machines.

And if I ever will have to use it I will put NVidia card into this — they at least works perfect in X11.



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State of ATI RS482 gfx driver

Thursday, May 1st, 2008 by Marcin Juszkiewicz

Recently my machine got series of instability problems. Current situation is — machine stable if Geforce 6600GT card removed. But this leaves me with ATI RS482 on-board graphics… And this chipset just suxx!

I use free driver — ‘radeon’ one. Does it works? Sort of. Problems noticed:

  • lack of EDID reading — so my 22″ lcd panel works in 1280×768 mode instead of 1680×1050
  • unreadable screen after switching to VT
  • X11 crash if qemu/SDL started
  • X11 crash if MPlayer with ‘x11′ driver used
  • X11 crash if VirtualBox started any virtual machine

Is it usable? Only if there is no other way. But I will rather work on getting my Geforce card working again then trying to get that ATI crap working properly.

TIP: to get 1680×1050 resolution working few commands needs to be run: 

xrandr --newmode "1680x1050R"  119.00  1680 1728 1760 1840  1050 1053 1059 1080 +hsync -vsync
xrandr --addmode DVI-0 "1680x1050R"
xrandr --output DVI-0 --mode "1680x1050R"

Anyway according to XRandR there are no monitors connected at all: 

12:36 hrw@home:~$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1680 x 1050, maximum 2560 x 1200
VGA-0 disconnected 1280x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
DVI-0 disconnected 1680x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
   1680x1050R     59.9*
S-video disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
  1280x768 (0x41)   80.1MHz
        h: width  1280 start 1344 end 1480 total 1680 skew    0 clock   47.7KHz
        v: height  768 start  769 end  772 total  795           clock   60.0Hz



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