[Wolves] X failure on Debian (long one...)

[Adam Sweet]

Hi guys and girls it's the perennial favourite.
Installed Debian 3.0r1 and X fails, I thought I'd ask
as I'm no expert (ie totally lost) when it comes to
understanding X failure output.

I have an ATI Radeon 9500 Pro and I'm fairly certain
thats the prob. XF86 4.1 doesn't know what to do with
it as it's pretty new. I built myself a custom 2.4.18
kernel with AGP, Radeon, DRI, framebuffer, Vesa VGA,
and VGA 16 support the Debian Way.

The card appears to provide the 2 devices, a Radeon
display adapter and also a standard VGA display
adapter, I noticed this in both Windows (2 devices and
2 drivers) and in Linux, as lspci produces the
following output:

<snip>

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies
Inc: Unknown device 4e45
01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc:
Unknown device 4e65

As I said I'm pretty certain that X won't have a
proper Radeon 9500 Pro driver, so I opted for standard
VGA and am trying to get it too use the VGA compatible
device.

dpkg-reconfigure xfree86-xserver requests the device
be passed by bus type, device and function number in
the following format:  PCI=nn:nn:nn where nn is the
previously mentioned params. It also mentions that the
output produced by lspci is in hex and should be
converted to decimal before being entered. I assume I
want the 01:00.0 part of the lspci output rather than
the 4e45 part and should enter it as PCI=01:00:0 but
the thing still doesn't work.

I also have to specify the amount of video RAM in kB
and I assume this means 1MB = 1024 kB so I say 131072
for 128MB. 

The crux of the error appears to be:

Fatal server error:
AddScreen/ScreenInit failed for driver 0

Scanning /var/logXFree86.0.log the parts that stand
out are (interspersed with blank lines and my own
comments preceeded by #):

(WW) Open APM failed

(WW) VGA(0): Mode pool is empty

(II) VGA: Generic VGA driver (version 4.0) for
chipsets: generic
(II) Primary Device is: PCI 01:00:0
(--) Chipset generic found

(II) Setting vga for screen 0.
(**) VGA(0): Depth 16, (--) framebuffer bpp 16
(==) VGA(0): RGB weight 565
(==) VGA(0): Default visual is TrueColor
(==) VGA(0): Using gamma correction (1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
(**) VGA(0): videoRam: 131072 kBytes (using 256
kBytes).

#remember the memory used when considering the
#insufficient memory error below

(--) VGA(0): Pixel clocks available:
(--) VGA(0): pixel clocks:  25.130  28.322  28.420 
28.420
(II) VGA(0): Generic Monitor: Using hsync range of
31.50-82.00 kHz
(II) VGA(0): Generic Monitor: Using vrefresh range of
50.00-110.00 Hz
(II) VGA(0): Not using default mode "640x350"
(insufficient memory for mode)

#in fact it is the same for all display modes, I just
#included the first as an example

(WW) VGA(0): Mode pool is empty
(==) VGA(0): Virtual size is 320x200 (pitch 320)
(**) VGA(0): Built-in mode "Generic 320x200 default
mode": 12.6 MHz (scaled from 25.2 MHz), 31.5 kHz, 70.2
Hz (VScan)
(II) VGA(0): Modeline "Generic 320x200 default mode"  
12.59  320 336 384 400  200 206 207 224 vscan 2 -hsync
+vsync
(++) VGA(0): DPI set to (100, 100)

Fatal server error:
AddScreen/ScreenInit failed for driver 0

</log>


I'm fairly certain the other config is fine, I entered
my exact monitor settings by hand from the spec sheet.
The only other things are that it asks if I want to
use framebuffer mode and I tried both and neither
works, but I don't know what to use as standard. 

Using any other combination of VGA driver/Radeon
driver and VGA compatible controller (01:00:0)/Radeon
display controller (01:00:1) produces much the same
output with 

No screen found

rather than the AddScreen/ScreenInit error.

I did some googling and came across someone who had a
similar problem with Radeon and Woody and was advised
to disable DRI and enable APM I have done both (DRI in
kernel and xserver) to no avail.

Sorry if this is all a bit much but I have to try,
it's either that or just move to Mandrake or something
again. If anyone wants various logs and config files
I'll be happy to provide, or if anyone just wants to
tell me to forget it, I will listen.

Thanks hopefully,

Ad

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