APR
24
2009

Kubuntu Jaunty (xorg 1.6) doesn't like ATI Radeon cards

Submitted by David Faure

Hearing that kubuntu jaunty was out, I upgraded two machines today.
My wife's machine, so she can finally use KDE 4.2, and my own desktop machine. On her machine, NVidia card, no problem at all.
On my machine, ATI Radeon X1300, after the upgrade, X would always just show some red dots on the top of the screen, and then the machine would hang (no keyboard, no ssh, nothing except reboot).
I tried every possible driver in xorg.conf, no difference. So this isn't a driver problem, but an Xorg problem.
Other people on #kubuntu (e.g. "chx") reported the same issue.

So... I recompiled the xorg packages from intrepid (i.e. X.org 1.5.2) so that they can be used on jaunty. Long and painful, but it solved the problem. Proof that the problem is really X.org 1.6.0.

In case anyone is interested: http://www.davidfaure.fr/2009/xorg_debs.tar.bz2

Quick instructions: download, unpack, then
sudo dpkg -r xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-input-all
sudo dpkg -i *.deb.

If you see apt-get -f install removing a bunch of video drivers, that's fine; I didn't recompile them all, only a few.

Comments

I get the same problem on my system: ATI Radeon 9550, except, it's with Xorg 1.5.3 on Gentoo

It happens when I make changes to my xorg.conf file. I haven't taken the time to figure out what's affecting it yet, though. OpenGL isn't working either, but that might be unrelated. It's probably about time I do some checking.

By soap at Sat, 04/25/2009 - 03:09

Disabling desktop effects solves the problem.
But avoid 3D applications. Here is a launchpad report on it.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/348332/

By Jos van den Oever at Sat, 04/25/2009 - 10:05

I'm not sure if my solution will help with you Ubuntu guys, but I've got it working now with OpenGL and everything. This page helped me:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/x/x11/xorg-server-1.5-upgrade-guide.xml

Basically, I just paid attention to the log files from X, and fixed the problems where they came up. All of that results in a very minimal xorg.conf (3 sections, each 2 lines).

The real problem seems to be with the "ati" drivers (I believe those are the FOSS ones), whereas the fglrx drivers work fine. It's too bad you can't have fglrx with Xorg 1.6 in Jaunty.

By soap at Sun, 04/26/2009 - 19:21

fglrx ati driver does not work with xserver 1.6 for all ATI X cards, so 1.5 is needed, but jaunty does not offer that. Is your package also reverting to xserver 1.5, so is it possible to again use fglrx ? Or do you use ati, as apparently your problem is there also for the ati driver

The ubuntu forum says to use the ati driver, as it supports 3D now, but the performance of ati driver is not acceptable for me. It is annoying that ubuntu does not offer to use xserver 1.5 by default for ati X card users. This frenzy to upgrade to the latest packages and breaking stuff for users every 6 months is not good for PR. What does 1.6 offer for greats anyway that cannot wait for october when fglrx should support 1.6?

By bmcage at Sat, 04/25/2009 - 10:59

My packages *are* about reverting xserver to 1.5, so that it is possible again to use fglrx indeed.

I wanted to also provide the ati driver for it, but compilation failed so I gave up on that.

Of course it would make more sense for someone @ kubuntu to do what I did and make it available as a real repository. I'm no packager so installation is a bit manual and I didn't find out how to prevent apt-get upgrade from upgrading to xorg 1.6 again. Googling suggested using Lock in synaptics, but that didn't seem to have any effect.

By David Faure at Sat, 04/25/2009 - 16:32

Hi! I am using Kubuntu 9.04. I have an ATI x1200.. My system architecture is i386, not AMD64. I see your packages are for amd64, so I downloaded from packages.ubuntu.com the i386 version of them. Then I downloaded the ATI Propietary drivers from ati and tried your commands.

I did this

sudo dpkg -r xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-input-all
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

and then, I installed the ATI drivers. I checked the Xorg version and it said Xorg 1.5.2 so I thought it was working. I restarted and nothing happened. I lost my Xorg, I had to use the recovery-mode, install Xorg 1.6 again in order to make it work. Installing all those packages also make some packages break, and if you try to fix them, you will get the Xorg 1.6. So please! Help.. what can I do to have Xorg 1.5.2 working in Jaunty?

By xaviermerino at Wed, 05/27/2009 - 17:15