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Re: the vanishing console message trick



Scott Henson wrote:

On Mon, 2003-01-06 at 23:51, Jeff Cours wrote:

I'm running a Pentium IV system tracking Debian testing. The video card is an ATI Radeon, Lilo's the bootloader, and I'm using a 2.4 series Kernel.

Is there anything else I should be looking at?

Well for one I don't see where the radeonfb driver is being loaded. Try
making sure that gets loaded.

I just went back through my installation notes. I remember having problems with radeonfb garbaging the screen, especially when X fired up, so I stopped loading it, and that seemed to make the problem go away. (Oddly enough, a Mandrake 9.0 installation I tried early on seemed to get the video stuff right, including switching to a virtual console when X was running. I haven't been able to get it all working properly under Debian yet. I wonder if they're patching their kernel differently.)

> I remember
having some trouble with my radeon and 2.4.17 through 2.4.19 kernels.  I
have used ac kernels for the longest time because my radeon work better
with them.  You might try getting the latest ac kernel or a
2.4.20-rcX-acY kernel.  The later being the best as I have had some
problems with 2.4.20-ac1 freezing up when trying to use 3-D apps.  My
last known-good kernel was 2.4.20-pre8-ac3.

I didn't see these listed under packages.debian.org. Are you recompiling your kernel from source? I noticed some "ac" patches at www.kernel.org, but didn't see any "rc" ones -- "release candidate" maybe? I'd like to keep the system reasonably stable, so I'm a little leery of putting an alpha or pre-release kernel on it.

In fact, the reason I'm using a Radeon is that I figured it was old enough that there ought to be solid support for it in X and the kernel. I think it cost me all of $40, and it's causing an annoying screen flicker, so I wouldn't be heartbroken switching to something else. Is there another 3D accellerator that works better and is supported out-of-the-box by Debian testing, both with the console and under X?

- Jeff



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