Arch Linux

Thrillhouse

Member

From: Arlington, VA, USA

Registered: 2007-05-29

Posts: 175

Xorg follies

I started my installation of Arch today.  I think I'm doing alright so far.  I upgraded the system using pacman.  That all seemed to work out fine.  I then wanted to install a desktop environment but I didn't realize that Xorg had not yet been installed.  So I executed

pacman -S gnome gnome-extra

and then realized that I would not be able to start Gnome because I had not installed xorg so I removed gnome and gnome-extra with pacman and then executed

pacman -S xorg

as per these instructions:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg7

Everything seemed to install fine.  I then used hwd to generate an xorg.conf then followed these instructions to get my ATI Radeon 9200 drivers installed:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI … figuration

I decided to use the open source drivers and I edited xorg.conf according to the instructions.  Now, my problem is, when I execute startx, it doesn't load.  This is what I got from cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep EE:

(II) Loading extensions MIT-SCREEN-SAVER
(EE) RADEON(0): [dri] RADEONDRIGetVersion failed to open the DRM
(EE) AIGLX: Screen 0 is not DRI capable

Can anyone help me to solve this problem.  I'd love to have a Desktop Environment available to me.  It would make things a lot easier.  Thank you.

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For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

rayjgu3

Member

From: Chicago IL usa

Registered: 2004-07-04

Posts: 695

Re: Xorg follies

What was missing was a driver, not ati but fglrx.

Read Wiki, section "Proprietary Driver: Fglrx".
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI

The link you gave was also helpful, especially if "Dell" is included in search field.
http://www.google.com/linux
with this "Dell 1920x1200  ati xorg" in search field.

taken from here
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=32775

i dont have ati card , so this is what i can tell you

hope it helps

ataraxia

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2007-05-06

Posts: 1,553

Re: Xorg follies

Actually, none of those errors should be fatal to Xorg (though you won't accelerated graphics unless you follow the previous post). It looks more like you never configured .xinitrc to do "exec gnome-session". Installing GNOME (or any Desktop Environment) does not run it by default. Since you didn't make it run one, Xorg has nothing to do and so it just exits.

Thrillhouse

Member

From: Arlington, VA, USA

Registered: 2007-05-29

Posts: 175

Re: Xorg follies

@rayjgu3: Thanks for the quick reply.  Unfortunately, I have now tried both the open source driver and the proprietary one.  Neither one seems to be working for me and I now have two "Device" sections in my xorg.conf.  One is for Card0 and is using the radeon driver while the other one is for aticonfig-Device[0] and is using fglrx.  However, I now have an addition to /var/log/Xorg.0.log:

(EE) No devices detected.

@atraxia: You're right.  I didn't do that.  However, I just added it and tried running startx again and it failed.  Do you think it might have had something to do with the fact that I tried to install the proprietary driver before I added that to .xinitrc?

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For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

Thrillhouse

Member

From: Arlington, VA, USA

Registered: 2007-05-29

Posts: 175

Re: Xorg follies

Success!

Removing the proprietary driver did it.  I now have a working xorg.conf.  Thanks ataraxia!

Last edited by Thrillhouse (2007-05-29 21:29:31)

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For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

ataraxia

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2007-05-06

Posts: 1,553

Re: Xorg follies

If you do end up installing the proprietary driver, all you really need to do in xorg.conf is change the "Driver" line in the "Device" section to use "fglrx". aticonfig just goofed me up.