Re: ATI video card confusion
On Sun, 2001-12-09 at 20:27, Stan Brown wrote:
> I'm in the process of puting together several Debian systems, that will run
> either woody or Progent (not certain yet). I ordered all the parts for
> these machines at once, in an atempt to have all the same components, well
> it seems to not have worked out quite that way.
>
> I order ATI Radeon LE video cards, based upon a recomendation from the Duke
> Of URL Linux midrange system web page.
>
> Of 5 cards I recieved 3 have fans on them, and 2 do not. A the ones _with_
> fan have a 2 x (I think) 15 pin DIP header on the top of the card close to
> the metal plate that goes in the hole in the case. The onew without fan
> actually have a sticker on the that says' Radeon LE", well one of the 2
> does :-). The ones with fan don't have this sticker. They do have a part
> no. of R6 DDR SG32M on them.
The fan is not relevant. Apparently ATI outsource their production to a
variety of PCB builders. You may get boards from any number of
manufacturers if you buy unboxed OEM versions. If you buy the retail
boxed version, you will definitely have product from a single
manufacturer. Anyway, the Radeon will operate without its fan, if you
replace it with a heat sink. It might even operate bare, but don't say
I told you that.
All the Radeon lines work with the "radeon" XFree86 driver, so it
doesn't matter if you got a mixed bag. When XFree86 starts, it will
definitely spew enough identifying information for you to figure it out.
> I'm confused! What do I have? and what X driver, and framebuffer driver
> should I be using?
>
> What started me down this road, is I have XFRee86$ (both Progeny supplied,
> and woody supplied) workign corectly with the units _with_ fans. I have not
> yet installed any of the non-fan units, so I can't speak to those.
>
> However when I compiled a 2.4.16 kernel and opted for framebufffer suuprt
> using the ATI Radeon driver, I got some strnage results. The first console
> started up looking OK, with the Penguin in the upper left hand corner, but
> shortly after that the startup messages stared overwriting it. This console
> was the useless, I was able to use other text consoles, but they got meesed
> up easily requiring a rest, and when I tried to display graphics using fbi,
> the colors were all messed up.
The Radeon framebuffer is very immature -- I would avoid it. Just use
the vesafb driver if you insist on framebuffers.
-jwb
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