I was attempting to get Debian (Squeeze, latest net-install CD) working with a Radeon X1900 Mac edition video card (PCI-Express) on my Power Mac G5 Quad. The installer acted a bit weird right from the start, telling me that the step "Install the system" failed (with nothing in the way of useful error information,) but I got the base system installed at least. It booted fine to framebuffer console, so I set about installing GNOME on it. apt finished with nary a complaint, but when I rebooted, I found that when it was ready to launch into X, it choked up and just sat there with a blank screen and a cursor. (Weirdly, though, the screen itself flickered on and off at a high rate, faster than the actual cursor blink.)
Framebuffer console still worked, at least, so I was able to boot into single-user mode and do some investigating in my own limited capacity for this stuff (by which I mean "Google error messages and see what specifics are requested.") lspci -k showed the video card properly with the manufacturer and product name, so it was recognizing it, at least. When I tried Xorg -configure, though (Xorg 1.7.7, it says,) it aborted with a "No DRICreatePCIBusID symbol" message. Checking dmesg gave me a "process Xorg mapped non-existing PCI legacy memory" message, followed by an "invalid ROM contents" message underneath. For the time being, I put the GeForce 6600 it came with back in and got things up and running. However, when I updated to Sid (unstable) to get Lightspark working, I thought I'd give it another try and see what happened. The flickering-cursor screen now does not happen, it recognizes the card fully and attempts to load the radeon driver - however, it's apparently conflicting with something or other: conflicting fb usage radeondrmfb vs OFfb ATY,Priona - removing generic driver This causes the system to hang completely, such that it can't even boot into single-user mode...any changes made to fix it will need to be done with the GeForce in its place. I'm not sure what all to make of this. I've found a thread about problems getting the same basic setup (G5 Quad, X1900, Debian) to work, but it's a couple years old and the symptoms are different. There's some discussion there about the radeon/radeonhd driver looking for Atom BIOS information on non-Atom BIOS cards, which would explain the "invalid ROM contents" message when running Squeeze, but on the other hand, that seems to be fixed in Sid. Obviously it's playing nicely enough to run framebuffer console output properly, but beyond that I'm not so sure. Does that "conflicting fb usage" message indicate some kind of driver conflict? If so, is there a way I can disable whatever's conflicting with it and leave only the radeon driver in place? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/cabcbcvnnvh4vaztqfdsmpbjensrikenq2ef9qj7yw0epcnk...@mail.gmail.com
