GNOME 3 fails on ATI Radeon 9200 Pro (RV280) Fedora 17

[Valent]

I just installed Fedora 17 for a friend of mine who has ATI Radeon 9200 Pro but GNOME 3 fails to load, I only get fallback mode.

Is this GNOME 3 issue or some bug in radeon drivers? Are there any tricks to make it work? Do proprietary drivers help?

I also reported this bug to Fedora bugzilla because I couldn't find anybody reporting this issue with this hardware - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=826420

---------- Post added at 09:59 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:37 AM ----------

# glxinfo | grep render
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R200 (RV280 5960) TCL DRI2

[Agent20]

I found this bug report of GNOME shell graphics corruption from last year that seems to end with all the cards from the R200 series being blacklisted so that fallback mode is always used:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=679579

We do not require working Shell on these adapters, an acceptable fix would be for the Shell support test (gnome-session-is-accelerated) to fail on these adapters so that fallback mode is used.

I don't know if there has been any development on the R200 driver in the past year. There is a way to get around the blacklist and so you can test, see post 7 in this thread:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1471711

... an alternative approach would be to replace /usr/libexec/gnome-session-is-accelerated with a script that simply always returns true. That is the script that gnome-session uses to determine whether the system has sufficient graphics support for the Shell to run.

The proprietary drivers do not support these cards, so the open source drivers are the only option.

[Valent]

UPDATE: I tried KDE with full Plasma desktop and it works just fine...

I read other threads but don't see any example how to trick GNOME 3 into removing ATI card from blacklist... has anybody made that script that is mentioned?

and file is also moved, new file that decides for compatibility is in
/usr/libexec/gnome-session-check-accelerated

[Agent20]

You could try the other method mentioned in the thread which is to use the command "gnome-shell --replace" from a terminal window, that seemed to start the shell without checking the blacklist (at least it did for F15).

Even if it renders GNOME shell perfectly it might be a bit slow on hardware of that age.

[Valent]

I tried enabling full GNOME 3 via 'gnome-shell --replace' and it starts but has quite a few artefacts, main one is that menu with logoff and shutdown is transparent and not showing all options.

Then I tried KDE4 with Plasma and it works, so I just stuck with KDE4, it works great on this particular ATI card.