Thinkpad, ATI, hell

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>]

I made the mistake of buying one of the `linux-ready' Lenovo Thinkpad
T60's a while ago, or rather made the mistake of buying one with an
ATI Mobility FireGL V5200 graphics controller and ever since I've
been in ATI hell.

The radeon driver crashes the X server at startup:

  Backtrace:
  0: /usr/bin/X11/X(xf86SigHandler+0x7e) [0x80c6a4e]
  1: [0xb7f23400]
  2: /usr/bin/X11/X(main+0x296) [0x80744c6]
  3: /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe0) [0xb7cad450]
  4: /usr/bin/X11/X(FontFileCompleteXLFD+0x201) [0x8073a31]

so I rely on ATI's proprietary drivers as packaged for Debian. I have
installed fglrx-driver, fglrx-glx, and fglrx-kernel-src, all at
version 8-6-2 from testing. The kernel version is 2.6.25-2-486 from
the Debian package.  But 3D acceleration stubbornly refuses to work:

(EE) fglrx(0): XMM failed to open CMMQS connection.
(II) fglrx(0): XMM failed to initialize!
(II) fglrx(0): Direct rendering disabled

(WW) fglrx(0): ***********************************
(WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization disabled!    *
(WW) fglrx(0): * 2D acceleraton available (MMIO) *
(WW) fglrx(0): * no 3D acceleration available    *
(WW) fglrx(0): ***********************************
(II) fglrx(0): FBADPhys: 0xc0000000 FBMappedSize: 0x10000000
(==) fglrx(0): Write-combining range (0xd0000000,0x10000000)
(II) fglrx(0): FBMM initialized for area (0,0)-(1408,8191)
(II) fglrx(0): FBMM auto alloc for area (0,0)-(1408,1050) (front colorbuffer - assumption)
(II) fglrx(0): Largest offscreen area available: 1408 x 7141
(==) fglrx(0): Backing store disabled
(II) Loading extension FGLRXEXTENSION
(II) Loading extension ATITVOUT
(**) fglrx(0): DPMS enabled
(WW) fglrx(0): Textured Video not supported without DRI enabled.
(II) fglrx(0): Using XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA)
     Screen to screen bit blits
     Solid filled rectangles
     Solid Horizontal and Vertical Lines
     Setting up tile and stipple cache:
	     32 128x128 slots
		32 256x256 slots
		   16 512x512 slots
(II) fglrx(0): Acceleration enabled

which means also that there is no xv:

  % xvinfo 
  % X-Video Extension version 2.2
  % screen #0
  % no adaptors present

glxinfo reports:

    OpenGL vendor string: Brian Paul
    OpenGL renderer string: Mesa X11
    OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.0.4

so somehow the mesa libraries are, I suppose, being loaded to do
software rather than hardware accelaration. I can't figure out why, though.

The fglrx kernel module is loaded:

   % lsmod | grep fglrx

   % fglrx                1674348  0 
   % agpgart                31152  2 fglrx,intel_agp

I've tried "UseInternalAGPGART" set to "yes" and to "no". 

I'm at my wits' end. Is there someone here who might have some advice
or pointers?

Thanks very much in advance,

Jim