The Xorg ATI Rage driver only half-works on my Sony C1 laptop.
More precisely, it only works with DefaultDepth 8, which seems to cause serious problems with some applications, eg Mozilla.
William Hooper kindly sent me an xorg.conf which does work with Depth 16, but only with the screen size 1024x768. This is almost unuseable on the small C1 screen, where I use screen size 1024x480 with Virtual screen 1024x768.
For some reason this does not work, though I would have thought it would be "easier" for the driver - one just gets a black screen slowing changing to a blank white screen.
In any case, this seemed to me a problem which should be easy to crack, so I tried looking for the Xorg documentation. Does this exist? I couldn't see any documentation at all at http://www.x.org. [There doesn't even appear to be a man page for the "ati" driver, so how does anyone know what options are available?]
And a quick view of the xorg buzilla was not reassuring. There seemed to be a tiny number of people involved in what must be a huge project. My conclusion - which could easily be wrong, as I know very little about the subject - was that the change from XFree86 to Xorg is a serious blunder. [I'd assumed that the XFree86 drivers would still be available to Xorg, but it seems from comments I read that this is not so, and that the two paths have diverged irretrievably.]
But to get down to specifics, it is clear that the "ati" driver - or any driver - must have a database of possible Modelines, since eg William Hooper's xorg.conf did not specify a Modeline. But where is this database? And what line in xorg.conf leads to it? Is it the ModelName "LCD Panel 1024x768"? If so, what other ModelNames can one substitute?
If anyone can cast light on what to me is a very dark corner I would be most grateful.