Arch Linux

PoopLoops

Member

Registered: 2009-07-07

Posts: 3

ATI Drivers aren't working.

This is my 2nd attempt at running Arch.  First time around, Xorg and junk was over my head, so I ran away.  Now I'm back with more knowledge and experience, but also with new hardware, and now it wants me to run away.

It's a Mobility Radeon HD 3870, M88 chipset.  On Jaunty 64 nothing worked, since the newest drivers are for the old version of Xorg (last I checked) and Jaunty uses the newer one.  On Hardy 32, I had a lot more luck.  The open-source radeon (non hd) driver and the proprietary ATI driver worked, as long as I didn't mess much with it.  Barely any 2D acceleration, and no 3D support, but something was there.

So, I installed the radeon open-source drivers, and the x-desktop environment (actually want GNOME, but that's easy to change, so whatever).  I started X and the login screen came up.  Except that I forgot to install HAL and didn't make an Xorg file with my keyboard/mouse settings.  So I had to hard reboot.

I came back to it a few days later (this is a side project of mine, no biggy), and now X starts, but to a black screen.  I then installed all the open source drivers, and even the proprietary ones and am just confused as to what to do.  Since I come from the land of Ubuntu, so I'm still getting used to managing packages with pacman.

Things would go a LOT smoother if I could just get Mozilla running.  That way I wouldn't have to keep rebooting to a different OS just to read up on what to try next before doing it. =/

Thanks in advance.

arkham

Member

From: Stockholm

Registered: 2008-10-26

Posts: 516

Website

Re: ATI Drivers aren't working.

You have more than one pc?

1) pacman -S sshd
2) Add sshd:allow to /etc/hosts.allow
3) Login with ssh from another pc to the machine with arch.

On a side note, nvidia cards constantly outperform ati cards' crappy performances.

---

"I'm Winston Wolfe. I solve problems."

~ Need moar games? [arch-games] ~ [aurcheck] AUR haz updates? ~

PoopLoops

Member

Registered: 2009-07-07

Posts: 3

Re: ATI Drivers aren't working.

No, I triple boot to Windows Vista/ Ubuntu Hardy/ Arch

This is a laptop, so I can't just switch out the cards... right?  I haven't had much luck finding laptop video cards at all.

Lastly, I have no idea what SSHing into this pc would do besides let me access and modify my files.  I can already do that.  I want to know which files to modify and how.

arkham

Member

From: Stockholm

Registered: 2008-10-26

Posts: 516

Website

Re: ATI Drivers aren't working.

Question

Things would go a LOT smoother if I could just get Mozilla running.  That way I wouldn't have to keep rebooting to a different OS just to read up on what to try next before doing it. =/

Answer

Lastly, I have no idea what SSHing into this pc would do besides let me access and modify my files.  I can already do that.  I want to know which files to modify and how.

---

"I'm Winston Wolfe. I solve problems."

~ Need moar games? [arch-games] ~ [aurcheck] AUR haz updates? ~

PoopLoops

Member

Registered: 2009-07-07

Posts: 3

Re: ATI Drivers aren't working.

Oh.  Since it's a laptop, I figured it wouldn't be too much harder to just have it right next to any usable computer, but I guess I didn't make it explicit that it's a laptop.