Radeon 9250 (Radeon 9200 Pro) on Ubuntu Gutsy
March 10, 2008 – 9:35 pmI have been trying to setup a new 64 bit Quad Intel Core with a Radeon 9250 video card. My operating system of choice for this rig was going to be Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10. I have enjoyed using Gutsy in the past and saw no reason to change from my standard.
When I began the installation process I needed to burn a Gutsy AMD64 bit 7.10 version CD, I popped it in and waited. After hitting the regular “install” option, the boot process went about half way through. At this point, the monitor lost the signal and the process locked. No amount of CTRL+ALT+DELETE or CTRL+F1-F10 could get a signal back.
What the hell happened?
I proceeded to install the OS through the graphically restricted option. Once the 64 bit system was installed I rebooted. From this point on, the only driver that would load the video card was “vesa” — that is it.
Fglrx, the ati binary driver dropped support for the 9500 and less series of Radeon cards some time ago.
It turns out the 64 bit ATI driver, literally “ati” in xorg, would not work. The driver causes the monitor to lose the signal no matter what options I attempted to pass in.
Thinking that this may just be a 64 bit problem, I installed the 32 bit version of Ubuntu. The CD booted up immediately and the install went off without a hitch. The “ati” driver was detected and the machine was running with 3D DRI libraries activated. This is exactly what I wanted, and I would have kept using, had it not been for the fact that the machine has 8 GB of RAM. Dought!
There is no reason to simply waste 4 GB of RAM, which is the max a 32 bit install will support. With this in mind, I decided to try my old OS of choice, Gentoo.
After painfully installing a stage3 build (and I say painfully because compiling things isn’t fun for me anymore), I managed to get an XServer running. The best I can get right now are the newest (masked) ATI Drivers (the open source variety), no DRI (3d) support. Xrandr 1.2 is running beautifully though! I am able to get the dual output from the card working well and dynamically adjust both monitors.
Currently Working:
- Dual Monitors output from both DVI and VGA port
- Xrandr 1.2 automatic resize, rotation, and alignment
Not working:
- Monitor rotation works, however the refresh is awful and unusable. The screen refreshes like someone is wiping it off with a squeegee. It’s like the “wipe” animation effect you often see used in Power Point.
- No 3D support. Not a huge deal for me, but I have the video card memory so it’s a bit of a waste
I have researched this quite extensively but still feel like I’m missing pieces. If anyone has any thoughts please post them.
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