Arch Linux

kungfoo

Member

Registered: 2006-09-09

Posts: 43

Xorg + fglrx = white screen

So I made the switch to arch on my laptop too.
All work nicely, except for fglrx. I had hdw generate a xorg.conf for me, and then edited the resolutions to fit ba hand.
Now when I select fglrx as a driver, the X server does nothing, but display a black screen at first. Over the course of about then seconds, all the pixels on the screen get brighter and brighter, till they're all full white.
Anyone seen this before? I'm not sure what to do. vesa as a driver works, but it is horribly slow on redering stuff, even in 2D.

Cerebral

Forum Fellow

From: Waterloo, ON, CA

Registered: 2005-04-08

Posts: 3,108

Website

Re: Xorg + fglrx = white screen

Sounds like you might be using a card that fglrx no longer supports?

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=25620

If this is the case, you'd best use the OSS drivers that ship with Xorg.  install xf86-video-ati and libgl-dri then use the 'radeon' driver in xorg.conf

kungfoo

Member

Registered: 2006-09-09

Posts: 43

Re: Xorg + fglrx = white screen

It's a IBM T40p. So i guess that makes me one of the f*cked users then...
Why did they drop support for those cards??

zen_guerrilla

Member

From: Greece

Registered: 2002-12-22

Posts: 259

Re: Xorg + fglrx = white screen

ATI and its proprietary drivers suck big time. I had lots of stability problems with them on my 9200 and it took a lot of tinkering to enable the DVI output.
After the upgrade to 2.6.18 I switched to X.org's open source drivers and they literally blew my mind . DVI works out of the box, DRI is almost as fast as fglrx and stability issues are long gone.
You should definetely give it a shot.

kungfoo

Member

Registered: 2006-09-09

Posts: 43

Re: Xorg + fglrx = white screen

Well I installed the OSS drivers, 2D works nicely. but 3D ie. ut2004 is slow, really slow. How can I tune the performance of the OSS drivers? I found some Options for xorg.conf, but none were documented in any way, and if someone has a really fast config I'd really like to see it

zen_guerrilla

Member

From: Greece

Registered: 2002-12-22

Posts: 259

Re: Xorg + fglrx = white screen

These options make a great difference:

Option "AGPFastWrite" "on"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"

and btw all options are documented (man radeon).
Make sure that 3D accel is enabled with

glxinfo | grep direct | awk '{ print $3 }'

If it returns Yes you're good to go.