Few weeks ago I bought a new PC with a graphics card based upon ATI 4890. Debian Lenny was installed on it and everything worked using an old 17" display (1280x1024).
One day I replaced the old display by a new 23" display (1920x1080) and then was dismayed to find that X-Window continued to work in the old resolution. I fooled around with /etc/X11/xorg.conf and tried various tricks - of no avail. The breakthrough came when I found from /var/log/Xorg.0.log that no ATI driver was used, but the vanilla vesa driver. The xserver-xorg-video-radeon version which I had on lenny (1:6.9.0-1 +lenny4) did not recognize ATI 4890. I found a patch in http://www.phoronix.net/downloads/rv770-4850-4870-id.patch which added to the driver support for ATI 4850 and ATI 4870. The URL http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ati_4870_oss&num=1 provided me with an hint how to locate the PCI chip ID for ATI 4890. However, I decided to see what do Debian Sid and Debian Squeeze have to offer. Turns out that they both offer version 1:6.12.3-1. To backport the package: 1. mkdir somesubdirectory 2. Do wget to the following three files to the subdirectory: http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/x/xserver-xorg-video-ati/xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.12.3-1.dsc http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/x/xserver-xorg-video-ati/xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.12.3.orig.tar.gz http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/x/xserver-xorg-video-ati/xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.12.3-1.diff.gz 3. tar zxvf xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.12.3.orig.tar.gz creating subdirectory xf86-video-ati-6.12.3 4. cd xf86-video-ati-6.12.3 5. Apply the diff file by means of: zcat ../xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.12.3-1.diff.gz | patch -p1 6. chmod +x debian/rules 7. Rebuild binary package fitting your environment using: dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc -d The -d flag is needed to override unsatisfied build dependencies or conflicts. In my case, the build was successful. After you built the backported package, you can use it as follows: 1. Now you can install the package by: dpkg -i ../xserver-xorg-video-radeon_6.12.3-1_amd64.deb 2. I found that I need to force the X-Server to use the backported driver by means of the following section in xorg.conf: Section "Device" Identifier "Default Screen" Driver "radeon" EndSection I hope the above information will be helpful also for other people. --- Omer -- My Commodore 64 is suffering from slowness and insufficiency of memory; and its display device is grievously short of pixels. Can anyone help? My own blog is at http://www.zak.co.il/tddpirate/ My opinions, as expressed in this E-mail message, are mine alone. They do not represent the official policy of any organization with which I may be affiliated in any way. WARNING TO SPAMMERS: at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
