Hi there! Now all this X stuff is becoming really annoying. I struggled for days to get it to work again after the upgrade to 1.6. I have a Radeon HD3200 and tried using fglrx, radeon, radeonhd, vesa, or no xorg.conf at all. I got a blank screen only and no apparent errors in the Xorg log. So it seems X was running fine, apart from having a blank screen.
I had similar problems when I started with this machine half a year ago. With every update of kernel, X or ati-drivers, I fear that my X will not work when I reboot. And half of the times this is true. For some three years before I had an old NVidia card, and experienced the same. But then I could just change driver from nvidia to nv and got X running, just without acceleration. What is quite annoying with my ATI card is that often I cannot go back to text mode then I try something new in my xorg.conf, and have to reboot. I know about Alt-SysRq-R, this works sometimes (but only once, not if I start X again), and sometimes it does not. The good news is, that with 2.6.31-tuxonice and ati-drivers-9.9-r2 suddenly all is working perfectly. For this time, let's see what the next update will do. But there is this machine of a friend which I just updated. She did not do this for about a year, mostly because she also had lots of troubles in configuring her X. She needs a working TV-out, which complicates things even more. And so she did not dare to change her working setup, I can understand this. Now I upgraded the machine, which was some trouble, too, many blockers and such. That's done, all is perfectly fine I think. But I did that from remote, now I tried to start X. Guess what happened. No apparent errors with radeon, radeonhd or without xorg.conf, but the screen just goes blank, the TFT enters suspend mode. With vesa, X hangs so I cannot go back into text mode and have to reboot. I replaced her TFT with a CRT monitor. Same result, whether I configure this monitor or not, when I start X it complains about bad frequencies. I did not try ati-drivers. Her card is a RV505 (Radeon X1550 Series) which is no longer supported by current ati-drivers. Older drivers might still work for a while, but only with kernels < 2.6.29. And I suspect the problem is not the driver itself, because radeon does not work, too, and I also had similar problems of a blank screen with an ATI card and different drivers. Today is her birthday, I intended to present her the updated PC with accelerated X and KDE4, but now she cannot use it at all. Any idea what do to now? Apart from buying a new graphics adapter, which might work, or might not work. Or trying more monitors. The xorg.conf and some log files are here, in case someone wants to have a look: http://wonkology.org/~wonko/tmp/tanja/ Thanks, Wonko
