video driver for ati graphics card

[joe k]

My acer Laptop has a ati x1200 video chipset
whats the name of driver that in stalls with AVlinux
I know its not ati, or radion. fglix drivers.    it gives some accelerated performance ??
     

[trulan]

You mean the driver that gets installed if you choose "Proprietary Video Driver Maintenance mode" in the Grub boot menu?  Call it the ATi driver, Catalyst, fglrx, whatever.  Just boot into proprietary driver mode, and the script will take care of selecting the correct driver for your video card.

[lokeyb]

hi I am also having trouble with my ati drivers (getting 1025x768 max resolution on a widescreen display). I have a new netbook/laptop and can't intall avlinux just yet (before I sort out the mess of recovery paritions etc) so I am running it live. My old laptop with avlinux installed is unfortunately unusable.

I followed the instuctions  in the manual using 'method 2' via the avlinux control menu.

when x is down i then run 'sudo sgfxi' at the prompt.

sgfxi updates itself then i have option to create xorg config file or quit so i create the file

then i hit enter to install th driver but i get this error:

resolving www2.ati.com... failed: Name or service not known.
wget: unable to resolve host address 'www2.ati.com'
err: 9197) The graphics driver.... failed to download -wget error.

there is a log file that I could attempt to retrieve but at this point x won't load again.

If i then try 'sudo sgfxi' again, a bunch of packages start downloading and updating fro the debian repos. There is no prompt to create an xorg file, but the download from www2.ati.com fails with the same error.



Any ideas on what I can do? Currently I'm considering doing a full install to a 16gb usb key and try to install the ati drivers manually but I have no experience with this and am not sure how sucessful I will be and whether it's worth the time investment (just want to record and edit on an existing project with ardour no mess around with graphics drivers).

If not I may try installing ardour to a more compatible linux distro, the later kernels (around 3.3 and 3.4) seem to work ootb with my hardware without need for proprietary drivers.

Thanks for any advice and sorry if I'm crashing this thread!

[trulan]

Hi lokeyb,

I've never tried installing the ATi drivers on a live system, but that would no doubt be pretty difficult.  You can try a full installation on a USB stick, but that will be very slow (and also kind of hard on the USB stick, due to the high number of rewrites incurred on a full installation).  If you have a USB hard drive, installing AVLinux to that will work very well.

Here are a couple of options:
1. Install the ATi drivers on a live booted system:
Download the ATi driver from here:
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx
If you save that to the hard drive of your netbook, you should be able to run the ATi installer (not sgfxi) from a live boot(it can run in X).  After it completes, it will want to reboot; I think you can switch to a tty (Ctrl+Alt+F1), log in as root, and run 'service slim restart' to restart X with (hopefully) working ATi drivers.

2. Create a USB stick with persistence.  This would let the 'live boot' system keep your changes through reboots.  There is a guide here on the forum for doing that, though it didn't work for me (only tried it once, briefly, a while ago).

3. Install AVLinux somewhere, install the ATi drivers, and use remastersys to create your own custom bootable ISO.

If you use option 2 or 3, you could also install the 3.4-rt AVLinux kernel that is in the 'testing' repos (see the AVLinux kernel repo thread).  I would be interested to know if that kernel has better support for your video card.

In any case, it's highly unusual for sgfxi to fail to download the driver packages.  That link appears to be dead, and sgfxi is updated quite frequently, so I'd expect it to be fixed very soon.  But having to download the drivers every time you reboot sounds like quite a pain...

[joe k]

Ha Lokeyd

If the system boots but fails to load the GUI log in, and gives xserver errors try
this.  now if you have mc installed it will be easy ( Midnight commander )
open mc as root go to /ect/x11 open xorg.conf file and edit the driver "ati"  
save . check it by pressing f3 make sure the "ati" is your driver.
then reboot . it should boot into the login screen. This driver is generic but will give good 2d desktop performance
but no 3d gaming.

jk