Arch Linux

VeXe

Member

Registered: 2013-02-13

Posts: 27

X/visual problems.

Hi, I'm fairly new to Arch. Installed the X64 version of it. Didn't install any DE, I just installed the Awesome window manager and gdm for the login thingy.
I'm facing a couple of X problems (not sure if I can call it X problems), but mainly they are:
1- Whenever I login to awesome, the wallpaper doesn't show till I restart awesome.
2- Whenever I try to edit something in a GUI text editor and try to scroll up/down, it becomes slow, laggy and gives a very poor visual look, the lines get kinda mixed up for a moment. After I wait a bit, everything gets back normal.
3- Whenever I switch between tags, it takes a little bit of time for the tag I switched to to become highlighted (in the upper left corner)

So generally, things aren't refreshing quickly.

The output of "lspci | grep VGA" is:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV710 [Mobility Radeon HD 4500/5100 Series]

Of course I downloaded all the catalyst-related stuff, like "catalyst-utils catalyst-dkms lib32-catalyst-utils"
And I enabled the dkms service "systemctl enable dkms.service"

I read that I should do "aticonfig --init", but when I did, it gave me:

aticonfig: No supported adapters detected

I read the wiki of course (installation guide), tried to do my researches the best way, messed around in the forums, but I didn't find what I'm looking for.

How to fix this? Is this related to my graphics card/driver? If so, how to properly update/configure my graphics card?

Thanks a bunch!

w201

Member

Registered: 2012-10-04

Posts: 289

Re: X/visual problems.

I had a similar problem when I installed the catalyst drivers, they vanished when I installed the xf86-video-ati drivers. You might want to try that. I have a Radeon hd 2400XT

VeXe

Member

Registered: 2013-02-13

Posts: 27

Re: X/visual problems.

Thanks a bunch man! Big hug!
Things looking better now, had some dependencies conflicts when I tried removing catalyst, but now almost everything's fine, even the fonts are better! JeeZ!
There's one catch though, when I login to Awesome, I still have that wallpaper problem, I still have to restart awesome, do I have to run some service at startup or something like that? But that's something minor, I could make a script that restarts awesome and let that script run at startup (any better idea?)

One more thing though, where are the config files for all the ATI and graphics-related stuff are kept?

Last edited by VeXe (2013-02-14 03:47:08)

w201

Member

Registered: 2012-10-04

Posts: 289

Re: X/visual problems.

Glad you got it sorted out. I don't know what's going on with your awesome. That's also my wm. One thing you can try is adding a theme in your awesome folder, then editing theme.lua to point to a wallpaper stored somewhere in the home directory. That's how I have mine set up.

Also, you should give the ATI wiki a read:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI

One tip however, if you ever need to look for a file in your system and you don't know where it is, you can try searching like this:

sudo find / -name "radeon" but the wiki should explain it all. Good luck bro

Last edited by w201 (2013-02-14 04:03:54)