ATI fglrx on FC5 ... console is missing characters

DanielP · #1 23rd May 2006, 12:36 AM

Hi,

I've got one strange problem. I recently installed Fedora Core 5 on my new Acer Travelmate 8204 (which btw has a Mobility Radeon X1600 w/ 256MB). I of course installed the fglrx_FC5smp package from livna.org and restarted my machine.

Unfortunately it doesn't work perfectly. Yes, I do know that I have to allow mods in SELinux (I enabled it even though I completely disabled the SELinux-service during installation of FC5) and I added the "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"-row to the xorg.conf.

Nevertheless I am having problems with it. I start up Fedora and first the screen is completely blank for several minutes. Since I am fairly used to driver-problems with linux i started trying all consoles (CTRL+ALT+Fx) until I reached CTRL+ALT+F7 and see there! The login screen starts to load as if nothing had happened. Of course I reboot to see if this glitch only appears once and no, the same thing happens. Although this time I press CTRL+ALT+F7 as soon as I see that all services have started and the login screen appears again.

Once I have doen this Ctrl+Alt+F/-procedure I can work in GNOME just fine but when I switch to a tty I see another problem: The screen is blank again, I only see one or two characters which are placed randomly somewhere on the screen and first after I blindly log in as root the tty refreshes and anything works perfectly.

Does anybody have any idea why this is?

Thanks in advance!

fhubers · #2 23rd May 2006, 12:45 AM

Did you follow all of the instructions at http://www.fedorafaq.org/#radeon it sounds like your xorg-x11 driver is missing.

r1348 · #3 23rd May 2006, 12:51 AM

As far as I know, the proprietary ATI driver doesn't support X1x00 class cards, bug ATI for updating their driver, they're treating linux users as b-class ones.

DanielP · #4 23rd May 2006, 12:55 AM

I did follow the instructions. As mentoined previously, anything works just as long as I am pressing Ctrl+Alt+F7. It's irritating like hell but well... if the X1600 isn't properly supported on Linux there isn't very much I can do besides reinstalling Windows.