I recently installed a new HD and used the occasion to upgrade from F7 to F10 (both 64 bit). Things worked and I was curious about the difference in graphics performance between the open driver and the ATI driver. So I downloaded the ATI driver, ran the install and rebooted. This caused me to now boot partway through in the usual way and then to get a black screen with no apparent responses to mouse or keyboard.
So I booted off the install medium and went into rescue mode with the HD mounted under /mnt/sysimage. I then discovered that there isn't apparently any xorg.conf. I was trying to reconfigure to get back to a working system. I went into a Phoronix forum and asked how, with this reply:
---- reply ---------------
The proprietary driver does not support Fedora in general, and specifically does not work on F10 today. I believe one user was able to get it working but please stick with the open drivers for F10.
There isn't much you can do about 3D performance immediately but if you enable EXA acceleration you should get pretty decent 2D performance. If you are willing to give up kernel modesetting you could probably also pick up the latest radeon release and get tear-free video playback as well, although I haven't tried the latest release on F10.
AFAIK the standard F10 install does not have an xorg.conf file.
------- end of reply ----------------
Mr. Bridgeman (the respondent) is I think a staff engineer at ATI who works on the process of disclosure of ATI card internals for free software programmers, so it seems his reply is likely to be authoritative. Fine. But how do I drop back to my previous working config?
Dave
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Dave Stevens geek@uniserve.com wrote:
Mr. Bridgeman (the respondent) is I think a staff engineer at ATI who works on the process of disclosure of ATI card internals for free software programmers, so it seems his reply is likely to be authoritative. Fine. But how do I drop back to my previous working config?
Do you know what changes the ATI proprietary driver install made to your system?
Was that done via an rpm package or via an install script?
Do you know what driver you were using before the proprietary ATI driver install?
Do you have a copy of the Xorg log from a working config before the ATI driver install to compare to a copy after the ATI driver install?
It's difficult to know what to suggest unless I have an understanding of what the driver install did to your system. And I have no idea. And you'll excuse me if I don't rush out and attempt it on my own system just so I can see what breaks.
Try: system-config-display --reconfig
may help or it may not. Since I don't know what the proprietary drivers changed. I can't tell you if its going to do anything to fix it.
-jef
On Thursday 08 January 2009 01:47:24 pm Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Dave Stevens geek@uniserve.com wrote:
Mr. Bridgeman (the respondent) is I think a staff engineer at ATI who works on the process of disclosure of ATI card internals for free software programmers, so it seems his reply is likely to be authoritative. Fine. But how do I drop back to my previous working config?
Do you know what changes the ATI proprietary driver install made to your system?
no
Was that done via an rpm package or via an install script?
install script
Do you know what driver you were using before the proprietary ATI driver install?
whatever the default F10 video driver is
Do you have a copy of the Xorg log from a working config before the ATI driver install to compare to a copy after the ATI driver install?
I'll look and get back to you
It's difficult to know what to suggest unless I have an understanding of what the driver install did to your system. And I have no idea. And you'll excuse me if I don't rush out and attempt it on my own system just so I can see what breaks.
makes sense
Try: system-config-display --reconfig
I don't have a usable system so probably I can't do that now.
may help or it may not. Since I don't know what the proprietary drivers changed. I can't tell you if its going to do anything to fix it.
ok, let me dig up some more info and get back to you.
Thanks,
Dave
-jef
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Dave Stevens geek@uniserve.com wrote:
Try: system-config-display --reconfig
I don't have a usable system so probably I can't do that now.
You can boot into runlevel 3 which will give you a console login prompt.. no X. login as root at that console and try that command. It will attempt to start an X server with default configs as Fedora understands them. But since the ATI script didnt create an xorg.conf file I dont hold high expectations on this working.
-jef
On Thursday 08 January 2009 02:50:45 pm Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Dave Stevens geek@uniserve.com wrote:
Try: system-config-display --reconfig
I don't have a usable system so probably I can't do that now.
You can boot into runlevel 3 which will give you a console login prompt.. no X. login as root at that console and try that command. It will attempt to start an X server with default configs as Fedora understands them. But since the ATI script didnt create an xorg.conf file I dont hold high expectations on this working.
-jef
Thanks Jef, but I could not figure out how to boot into runlevel 3. I know how to do this from a terminal prompt but could not get that far in the process. So I blew away the installation and reinstalled on top. Am now updating and configuring.
dave
Dave Stevens wrote:
On Thursday 08 January 2009 02:50:45 pm Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Dave Stevens geek@uniserve.com wrote:
Try: system-config-display --reconfig
I don't have a usable system so probably I can't do that now.
You can boot into runlevel 3 which will give you a console login prompt.. no X. login as root at that console and try that command. It will attempt to start an X server with default configs as Fedora understands them. But since the ATI script didnt create an xorg.conf file I dont hold high expectations on this working.
-jef
Thanks Jef, but I could not figure out how to boot into runlevel 3. I know how to do this from a terminal prompt but could not get that far in the process. So I blew away the installation and reinstalled on top. Am now updating and configuring.
1. Press any key when the grub message is shown 2. Use the arrow keys to highlight the kernel you want to boot 3. Press "E" 4. Use the arrow keys to highlight the line starting with "kernel" 5. Press "E" again 5. Use the arrows to go to the end of that line 6. Tack on a " 3" (a space, then a 3...do NOT include the quote marks) 7. Press the "ENTER" key 8. Press "B" to boot it
The system will boot to run level 3 for this boot ONLY. This isn't a permanent change...it just affects the current boot. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer ricks@nerd.com - - AIM/Skype: therps2 ICQ: 22643734 Yahoo: origrps2 - - - - We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART? - ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dave Stevens wrote:
Thanks Jef, but I could not figure out how to boot into runlevel 3. I know how to do this from a terminal prompt but could not get that far in the process. So I blew away the installation and reinstalled on top. Am now updating and configuring.
That was probably the best solution. Next time stay away from install scripts, that's what RPMs are for. Uninstalling stuff installed with a script is always a PITA. And that there is no fglrx RPM in the stable RPM Fusion repositories for F10 is not an oversight, it's missing for a reason.
Kevin Kofler
On Fri, 2009-01-09 at 05:09 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
That was probably the best solution. Next time stay away from install scripts, that's what RPMs are for. Uninstalling stuff installed with a script is always a PITA. And that there is no fglrx RPM in the stable RPM Fusion repositories for F10 is not an oversight, it's missing for a reason.
Kevin Kofler
fglrx ships with an uninstall script. I believe it was in /usr/share/ati. And, yes, you never know whether this script deletes everything what fglrx created.
Jeff Spaleta wrote:
Try: system-config-display --reconfig
may help or it may not. Since I don't know what the proprietary drivers changed. I can't tell you if its going to do anything to fix
Just thought I would add my experience in here - I have a system on which I used a normal F10 install and got graphics totally messed up with an Intel 82945G graphics chipset. Once I had been able to get to boot to runlevel 3 I was totally unable to start x doing system-config-display --reconfig (and of course system-config-display is not installed by default so you have to install it via yum after the main install!)
I also saw that in this situation system-config-display --noui --reconfig should work but in my case it refused to see the graphics card at all... so in the end I decided to go back to the start and do a clean install from scratch again, but this time used the "xdriver=vesa nomodeset" kernel option both for the install, and also for firstboot - and then once firstboot was complete I added these to the grub stanza so ensure that the vesa driver was used subsequently during boot.
At present it seems like there is an awful lot of breakage in the intel drivers and possibly the ATI drivers - and there is nothing more disheartening than having a system that won't offer a graphical login even if you know there are serious issues with the graphics drivers. Almost anything else you can work around since you can get to a graphical desktop and keep working on other stuff whilst you fix issues via the command line in a terminal window. By the way this is not specifically a Fedora problem - this graphics driver pain is being felt by users of other major linux distributions also - but it is certainly giving a bad smell to those who have hardware that is affected by this.
On Friday 09 January 2009 13:20:52 Mike Cloaked wrote:
Jeff Spaleta wrote:
Try: system-config-display --reconfig
may help or it may not. Since I don't know what the proprietary drivers changed. I can't tell you if its going to do anything to fix
Just thought I would add my experience in here - I have a system on which I used a normal F10 install and got graphics totally messed up with an Intel 82945G graphics chipset. Once I had been able to get to boot to runlevel 3 I was totally unable to start x doing system-config-display --reconfig (and of course system-config-display is not installed by default so you have to install it via yum after the main install!)
I also saw that in this situation system-config-display --noui --reconfig should work but in my case it refused to see the graphics card at all... so in the end I decided to go back to the start and do a clean install from scratch again, but this time used the "xdriver=vesa nomodeset" kernel option both for the install, and also for firstboot - and then once firstboot was complete I added these to the grub stanza so ensure that the vesa driver was used subsequently during boot.
At present it seems like there is an awful lot of breakage in the intel drivers and possibly the ATI drivers - and there is nothing more disheartening than having a system that won't offer a graphical login even if you know there are serious issues with the graphics drivers. Almost anything else you can work around since you can get to a graphical desktop and keep working on other stuff whilst you fix issues via the command line in a terminal window. By the way this is not specifically a Fedora problem
- this graphics driver pain is being felt by users of other major linux
distributions also - but it is certainly giving a bad smell to those who have hardware that is affected by this.
I had a conversation with a kde developer about graphics problems, largely because I'd had the freezing problem. I think it's relevant here to quote him:
The default acceleration path for most drivers right now is the outdated and slower XAA (Option "AccelMethod" "XAA") which is not recommended anymore, especially with compositing. Unfortunately, the proprietary binary blobs of ATI and NVidia still only support XAA
He went on to tell me that 3D and EXA support for HD2xxx and above is expected later this year (2009) as they are already in an experimental branch (of free drivers, AIUI).
Anne
sudo yum -y install system-config-display
sudo system-config-display
(Will create the xorg.conf)
--- On Thu, 1/8/09, Jeff Spaleta jspaleta@gmail.com wrote: From: Jeff Spaleta jspaleta@gmail.com Subject: Re: the ATI proprietary driver and F10 To: "Community assistance, encouragement, and advice for using Fedora." fedora-list@redhat.com Date: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 4:47 PM
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Dave Stevens geek@uniserve.com wrote:
Mr. Bridgeman (the respondent) is I think a staff engineer at ATI who
works
on the process of disclosure of ATI card internals for free software programmers, so it seems his reply is likely to be authoritative. Fine.
But
how do I drop back to my previous working config?
Do you know what changes the ATI proprietary driver install made to your system?
Was that done via an rpm package or via an install script?
Do you know what driver you were using before the proprietary ATI driver install?
Do you have a copy of the Xorg log from a working config before the ATI driver install to compare to a copy after the ATI driver install?
It's difficult to know what to suggest unless I have an understanding of what the driver install did to your system. And I have no idea. And you'll excuse me if I don't rush out and attempt it on my own system just so I can see what breaks.
Try: system-config-display --reconfig
may help or it may not. Since I don't know what the proprietary drivers changed. I can't tell you if its going to do anything to fix it.
-jef
-
Anne Wilson -
Dave Stevens -
Dmitri Bachtin -
Jef Spaleta -
Kevin Kofler -
Leslie S Satenstein -
mike cloaked -
Rick Stevens