Bug#629259: ATI RADEON 9200 freezes on Squeeze with firmware-linux-nonfree
Package: firmware-linux-nonfree
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks the whole system
I'm trying for several days to get my display up and running on fresh install
of Debian Squeeze. I was looking to find the original drivers from the OEM here
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/linux64-radeon-prer200.aspx but
there are just .rpm packages so I've checked here
http://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo in order to finally get my screen to display
more than a couple of colors, but..
After installing the package firmware-linux-nonfree and reboot, I couldn't even
get to the login screen, because display would stuck just before the background
image of the login screen was fully displayed (animated/faded out). The display
would just freeze and that's it. The mouse would respond for the next couple of
seconds and it would also die. From that moment on only physical reset button
could be of any help :(
Trying to figure out what the problem is (and how to stop loading of gnome to
have the simple shell login, so I can remove the package), I've found the key
combination Ctrl+Alt+F1 and Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. On next reboot I tried
constantly pressing these combinations and finally somehow I've got the console
login without GUI, which has let me to login just to show me the message like
this one (several seconds after the login): "... [drm:radeon_fence_wait]
*ERROR* fence(...) 510ms timeout going to reset GPU" and after that, again it
just froze.
I don't really know what is wrong here, maybe even I've made some wrong steps,
but this really influenced me to stop thinking about switching to Linux,
although I'd really like to give it a try and not give up this easy, but when
the most basic stuff can't work out-of-the-box (like the display driver) it
really makes me feel uncomfortable to proceed any further :/ No offence..
Is there any command I can type or anything I can do to give you a more
detailed report, so that this issue can be resolved?
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.1
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
firmware-linux-nonfree depends on no packages.
firmware-linux-nonfree recommends no packages.
Versions of packages firmware-linux-nonfree suggests:
ii initramfs-tools 0.98.8 tools for generating an initramfs
ii linux-image-2.6.32-5-6 2.6.32-34squeeze1 Linux 2.6.32 for modern PCs
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