On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 05:33:22PM -0400, Walter Webb wrote: > Well, I tried KMS on both computers. Both hesitated for a long time > when booting, after which the older one with a Radeon HD 3600 Series > made the display unusable; lots of colors in a fine-grained display. > The newer one with a Radeon HD 5500 Series displayed 240x75 > characters on a 1920x1200 screen. X worked normally. >
The hesitation is probably down to missing firmware. I think that the name of the sought firmware is only displayed on the console (if that works), not in the logs. It might also be in dmesg, I'm not sure, but that too isn't useful if the display is trashed. My previous radeons were r100 and r200 - at the moment those don't need external firmware but almost every newer radeon does. Does the 3600 have X installed ? If so, you could try logging in blind and trying 'startx', then looking at dmesg just in case it will tell you. Otherwise, try using lspci to identify the radeon as best you can [ -v, -vv, -vvv - whichever is most useful ] and google for that + 'firmware'. You could also google to see if there are any kernel bugs reported for that hardware - newer kernels are sometimes better (or occasionally worse ;) For the HD5500, 240x75 sounds correct for an 8x16 font. If that is too small to read, you can either use a bigger font (for 12x22 there is the 'sun' font in the kernel - if that is a good size there are others, including my LatGrkCyr-12x22, depending on how many glyphs you wish to be able to render. If you wish to continue with an 8x16 font you could try adding something like 'video=1024x768' to the grub command line [ copy the whole entry for this kernel, then add this to the copy - that way you can always go back to the "working, but tiny" version if it doesn't boot ]. I don't know if there are limits on which values are accepted by video= ... 1024x768 suits my 1600x1200 screen when I use an 8x16 font, ideally you would want something a bit more for your wider screen, maybe 1280x768 will work for you. And yes, kms is *fun* when it plays up. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
