Yet another fglrx black screen. Does anyone use fglrx?

[rcxAsh]

I've been trying to get the proprietary ATI drivers working, but have not been successful. I've never had them working before, so it's my first time trying. This is my first ATI card after a couple nVidia ones.

I'm not sure where to start. Looking around the internet, it seems that a lot of people have had this black screen problem (trying to start X with the fglrx driver selected results in a black screen and an unresponsive PC). In my case, everything appears to be locked up. Any ssh sessions die and I have to reboot the computer physically. I couldn't seem to find a solution for this (as it appears many have not either).

I've tried toggling the UseInternalAGPGART to no avail. The X output is shown below (as viewed from an ssh session - no log is ever written, as I don't think the system gets a chance to before everything freezes).

The log is incomplete, as the system freezes before any error message is thrown. So I'm a bit of a loss as to where to start looking. Any ideas are appreciated!

I'm running an AGP X800 on an AMD64 3200+, but with a 32-bit install... (I originally had a 64-bit install, but I thought that it was the reason for my fglrx headaches. But apparently, it's the same in the 32-bit install...)

[bunder]

which version of ati-drivers? or all of them? which framebuffer are you using?

cheers
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[rcxAsh]

Thanks for the reply. I'm using the latest stable ebuild for the ati-drivers, which provides version 8.501. I've just installed the system, so I have not setup any frame buffer stuff yet. Support for frame buffer devices is currently disabled under my kernel config in Device drivers -> Graphics support.

My kernel is 2.6.25-gentoo-r7
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rcxAsh

[rcxAsh]

I had read about people fixing the issue by increasing their AGP aperture size. However, when I originally tried that, I hadn't thought about maxing out the aperture size in my BIOS...

Strangely, I just set my aperture size to the highest possible value, 512MB, and X started up fine with fglrx

I guess, it's good that it works. But it's kind of annoying that I need the aperture to be 512MB! I only have 1GB of RAM in this machine. So 512MB is a bit much in my opinion... The threads I saw online, most people fixed it by using an aperture of 256MB. However, this didn't work for me...

I kind of miss the nvidia drivers ha...
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rcxAsh

[EzInKy]

Why bother with the headaches of the proprietary drivers when the open source ones work nicely with the X800/X850 cards? I've put them in at least five different machines with hardly any problems. Oh, and I'm pretty sure the aperture size refers to the card's memory, not your system's.
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Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.

[rcxAsh]

The main reason why I stuck with the proprietary nVidia drivers and now the ATI ones is because I found and people also report better performance with them. I know that glxgears isn't much of a benchmark, but as the only example I have with ATI right now, I am getting roughly three times the frame rate with the proprietary drivers over the radeon ones.

Granted, I was just about to call it a day with the fglrx stuff and stick with the open source radeon one.
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rcxAsh

[EzInKy]

I can understand wanting performance and wish the best of luck, but fps isn't the only factor in determining how well drivers work. The proprietary ATI drivers have a long history of problems, particularly with switching between multiple logins.
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Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.

[rcxAsh]

What kind of problems do people experience with multiple logins? You may have to forgive me a bit, because I haven't actually used ATI cards at all in Linux until perhaps seriously today when I had some time to try to sort out the fglrx issues.

I've been a long time nVidia user, and their proprietary Linux drivers have worked quite well in my experience. I guess I was just hoping that ATI would have been able to stabilize their drivers after all these years (I first picked my first nVidia card due to the recommendation that nVidia provided the best support for their hardware in Linux, compared to ATI). I've only recently inherited this ATI card from a friend.

I understand your comment that driver quality isn't necessarily performance. No doubt, if it was impossible to get the fglrx stuff working, I wouldn't have just thrown Linux out the window to return to Windows. It's just that if for what I need to do, if I am able to get it working, then I'll use it while I can. Granted, this is only my first day using an ATI card in Linux.. so who knows what might happen tomorrow. If in the event I find that the ATI drivers turn out to be too much of a pain, then yes, I can switch back to the radeon ones at any time.
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rcxAsh

[EzInKy]