SOLVED Upgrade X >7.0 Need hlp driver/conf. ATI 3D RAGE PRO

Gooserider · Last edited by Gooserider on Sun Aug 27, 2006 4:37 am; edited 1 time in total

I am trying to upgrade my system from the old X-Windows to the new Modular X 7.0. The system is an old Celeron box with an ONBOARD (thus not easily changed) ATI 3D Rage Pro card.

I followed the instructions in the Modular X HOWTO guide, and didn't have any major issues. However, my new installation won't work. I give the "startx" command (as a user, but I don't think that doing it as root would change anything), the screen goes blank and then comes back to the command line with a bunch of error messages...

Initially I tried using the "ati" driver as that is what my old /etc/X11/xorg.conf file had when I grepped per the Howto. That gave me an error to the effect of "no such driver"

Per lspci, I have the following:

VGA Compatible Controller: ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage Pro AGP 1X/2X (rev 5c)

Searching the forums, I found this thread that said I needed the "radeon" driver, but couldn't find any further info on what I needed to setup in order to make things work. I managed to add the radeon driver, and thought I had made what changes were needed in my make.conf and /etc/X11/xorg.conf files, but no joy....

Currently, my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in relevant part says

GoingDown · Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 5:48 am Post subject:

radeon driver should work. Try to remove following lines from your xorg.conf:

Bloop · n00b Joined: 07 Oct 2005 Posts: 26 Location: Germany

Hi there

Post your make.conf. Do you have compiled Xorg with VIDEO_CARDS= ... or this setting in make.conf?

Greetz Bloop

Gooserider · Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 5:22 pm Post subject:

GoingDown: The card ID seems slightly different, I had "1:0:0", LSPCI showed "01:0.0" I fixed that and commented out the lines you suggested, The result is a slightly different error message set

but still no joy...

dpryden · n00b Joined: 12 Sep 2002 Posts: 43

I have an ATI Xpert 98, which is built with the ATI 3D Rage Pro XL chipset, so it seems like a close match.

For me, the trick was changing to Driver "vesa" in xorg.conf (make sure you have "vesa" in your VIDEO_CARDS line in make.conf as well). Once I switched to VESA everything worked fine.
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Gooserider · Posted: Sun Aug 27, 2006 4:33 am Post subject:

Well I should have changed the title to say "solved" sooner. I have X working.

What I ended up with is the following in my make.conf (relevant bits only).

nextgen · Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 10:35 pm Post subject:

I too used the "ati" driver in my xorg.conf file, but I can't manage to have direct rendering.

Gooserider · Posted: Thu Nov 16, 2006 2:54 am Post subject:

Sorry Nextgen, I've never really looked!

Checking right now, I don't think so - This is the output I get from "glxinfo" - it isn't something I ever really cared about honestly...

As I understand it, glx is mostly useful for gaming and other high speed graphics stuff, which I'm not into, so having bleeding edge graphics never rated very high with me. Good old standard X has always seemed enough to me for browsing, office tasks, e-mail and the like. I find that I tend to try and turn down alot of the 'eye-candy' stuff even in stock KDE, and consider 3-D to be a total dud.

Perhaps I'm an old fuddy-duddy, but I have certain things I like to do on my computer, and find that stuff like eye-candy and fancy graphics tend to be more of a distraction than a help in getting them done...

The graphics I was getting kept me happy, so I never tried poking around in them to make them better. FWIW, I don't see a big difference between the graphics on the ATI box or the Nvideous Geforce2 (w/ Open Source X driver) that I have on my newer box, or the Diamond S3 Virge card I had on the P-200 box I just retired... I was happy w/ all of them so why worry.

nextgen · Posted: Thu Nov 16, 2006 4:16 am Post subject:

Thanks for the reply.
I've lived (reasonably) happily without DRI for years. I'm not into gaming either. I was hoping DRI could help relieve load on my old beloved PII 350MHz processor, which I find rather slow.

Gooserider · Posted: Thu Nov 16, 2006 10:22 pm Post subject:

I dont know that speeding up the graphics would help that much... I've never tried to measure it, but my 'seat of the pants' impression was that graphics were never that much of a bottleneck. I always found the killers to be heavy disk use, or lots of crunching in the background (like doing a major emerge) The really serious hit came when the system started doing a lot of swapping to disk.

The best cure for that is to max out your RAM. (if you haven't already done so) Since the memory for those old boxes is pretty much obsolete, you should be able to find it for little or nothing.

One of the other things I've noticed is that at least with the stuff that I've been running, the thing acts embarrassingly like that other O/S and needs to periodically either have X restarted, or even be rebooted :oops:

It seems that over a few hundred hours, I see my %use on swap slowly climb until it gets to be about 80% or so, then it skyrockets to 98%+ and the system starts flogging so badly I have trouble even getting a keyboard response so I can shut things down and I have to do a power cycle :cry:

to get the system back. I don't know if it's a memory leak or what.

I will say that I'm at the point where I basically won't spend any money on upgrading my old boxes, anything I put into them will be either salvage or 'dumpster dive' parts. (of which I have plenty...)

My opinion is that right now the best bargain boxes are the fast X86-32 machines, particularly AMD Athlon's. They are cheap because everyone seems to want to go for the 64 bit machines, but they are still plenty fast, and in some ways the 32-bit software trees seem to be more available, reliable and debugged than the 64 bit stuff....

Gooserider
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Box 1: P2 Celeron 400, 320mb RAM, 80GB HD, Cirrus Logic 4614/22/24 sound card, ATI 3D RAGE PRO AGP 1X/2X (sound & video onboard)
Box 2: AMD Athlon 2500+ 512mb RAM, 80GB HD, Gigabyte K7 Triton (Nvidia) mobo, GeForce2 video

nextgen · Posted: Thu Nov 16, 2006 11:07 pm Post subject:

Gooserider · Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2006 3:05 am Post subject: