Re: Knoppix 5.0 and ATI X200M videocards
Dear Yannick,
On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 02:40:13PM -0400, Yannick Simard wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Although fairly experienced in the technical IT field,
> I'm pretty new to this Linux stuff.
Well, if you know ANY Unix brand, which is a necessary part of the
technical IT field, you already know Linux. :-)
> My research showed
> that Knoppix would be a great place to start.
>
> Received my Knoppix 5.0 DVD yesterday (too long to
> download with my dial-up connection).
Please be aware that Knoppix 5.0 is not officially released yet. The
vendor who sold it to you has probably a "ripped" copy from Cebit, and
modified it without my permission to boot in english.
Which is still legal in terms of the GPL, if he can also provide the
complete source of this DVD to you on request.
> Tried running it with my laptop, a Toshiba Satellite
> M50 and it works quite well. The only issue seems to
> be with the integrated video chipset, an ATI X200M.
>
> During the boot sequence, the video diagnostics does
> recognize an ATI videocard but can't identify which
> model. Had to use "knoppix xmodule=vesa" at the prompt
> to get in.
There are "chipset" drivers in the X server chich have to match
the individal graphics adapter. For an ATI card, this could be
xmodule=ati
or
xmodule=radeon
or
xmodule=vesa
(the last one if the chipset is newer than the X server,
and therefore has no accelerated driver).
> Using Knoppix from the DVD, can I upgrade the
> videodrivers? Is there another command I should use
> instead of the "vesa" default?
If you have no Unix experience yet, this can be a quite tiresome task.
Especially ATI and NVidia, the two major brands, have a weird ("keep
everything secret and never publish technical specs or source code"
policy for their latest hardware, which makes it VERY hard to reverse
engineer accellerated drivers. This is probably only going to change if
they lose a significant market share because either people are not
buying their hardware anymore because nothing except Windows is well
supported, or just because the proprietary drivers that are issued by
ATI and NVidia can be a high security risk and stability impact.
I would recommend to only use the free drivers that come with Xorg (or
XFree86, if you have an older Knoppix version). If these don't work, the
universal framebuffer driver can be helpful, so you would start with
fb1280x1024
or
fb1024x768
or
fb800x600
all of these INSTEAD of the usual "knoppix" in front of the boot command
line, because they change normal behaviour. The framebuffer modes
usually work best when you need to do a presentation on a beamer, and
wat to avoid the horror of finding out how to get the right frequency
and port for the beamer signal. Disadvantage is, they are not
accellerate, so no fast 3D games.
You could also use the "games-knoppix" derivate
(http://games-knoppix.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/) if you want to try the
proprietary drivers issued by NVIdia or ATI. But if you need a stable an
secure system, I would not use these. In fact, I would avoid buying
hardware that is not fully supported by open source software. Therefore,
I always have a Knoppix DVD with me for testing computers in shops, so I
can make recommendations about which computers to buy, and avoid "cheap"
or "pimped up" computers that have chipsets which are simply
unsufficient for stable and productive use.
For technical reference, the "xmodule=", "vsync=" and "hsync=" options
just influence the settings of the Xserver config file,
/etc/X11/XF86COnfig-4 for XFree86, and /etc/X11/xorg.conf for the newer
Xorg server.
You may find out more about Knoppix boot options in the "knoppix
cheatcodes" on your DVD (KNOPPIX/knoppix-cheatcodes.txt). Also, the
forums and docs at http://knoppix.net/ are a good starting point.
With kind regards
-Klaus Knopper
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