Getting a Radeon 9200 to do 1600x1200, DRI and Beryl/AIGLX
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Submitted by ironstorm.
on 2006-12-11 01:59.
AIGLX+Beryl is a major eye candy enhancement to the Xorg graphical window system. It offers Linux the ability to look like Mac OSX, except it is entirely skin-able and customizable through plugins. To see an example of the amazing stuff Beryl can do, check out this short 2 minute demo vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CgY6MupA-s.
Spent some time Saturday making my friend's old Radeon 9200 do AIGLX+Beryl
on my Mythbox.
Followed the AIGLX for Edgy set-up guide on the offical Beryl wiki here: http://wiki.beryl-project.org/index.php/Install/Ubuntu/Edgy/AiGLX. Next I needed to put my Radeon card into accelerated rendering mode, so I followed the driver info block here: http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/BerylOnEdgy#Radeon_Driver (I added the part for 9200 owners after I figured everything below out).
A couple of things gave me grief and I was fortunate to get through them all eventually. Here they are, hopefully they will save others some troubles:- First problem was getting the video card to do 1600x1200, I knew this was possible as I had a Radeon 9000 in my old X1000 Presario which was able to do 1920x1200... After much searching and tweaking I found the block yielded best results for my Viewsonic VP201b:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
ModelName "Viewsonic vp201b"
#ModelName "Viewsonic vp201s"
VendorName "VSC"
HorizSync 30-75
VertRefresh 50-60
Option "DPMS"
# Option "ReducedBlanking" # Radeon will scale low res to 1600x1200 without this line!!
Option "DDCMode" "off"
DisplaySize 410 310
Modeline "1600x1200" 162.0 1600 1664 1856 2160 1200 1201 1204 1250 +hsync +vsync # Default detected
# Modeline "1600x1200" 130.25 1600 1648 1680 1760 1200 1203 1207 1235 # 1920x1200 low flicker
EndSectionThanks to this page: http://suif.stanford.edu/~csapuntz/rv280-linux-dvi.html for the ReducedBlanking tip that goes with the 1920x1200->1600x1200 modeline... that was what first enabled me to get X to start at 1600x1200, eventually I went with a different modeline.
- I had had an Nvidia 6200 video card in this box until recently to get the "Radeon" driver to do direct rendering the Nvidia GLX libs have to get removed. So do this if you are Upgrading from an Nvidia to an ATI:
sudo aptitude purge nvidia-glx
- Finally I had trouble getting direct rendering (`glxinfo | grep rendering` in an xterm to check) going (likely caused because I had removed agpgart from my kernel modules list to help my Nvidia card)... In my /var/log/Xorg.0.log I was seeing:
(WW) RADEON(0): [agp] AGP not available
To solve this the solution was to add the bold line at the bottom of my "Device" block below:
(EE) RADEON(0): [agp] AGP failed to initialize. Disabling the DRI.
Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies, Inc. RV280 [Radeon 9200]"
# Driver "ati"
Driver "radeon"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
ChipId 0x514D
Option "DRI" "true"
Option "ColorTiling" "on"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"
## Some may experience very poor performance without hashing the following line.
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
## If above is hashed, change the following to "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"
Option "EXANoOffscreenPixmaps"
# Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "AGPMode" "8" # <- x may be 2 or 4 depending on your system
Option "AGPFastWrite" "on"
Option "BusType" "PCI" # If agpgart is not in lsmod listing, Radeon 9200 will complain of no AGP and disable DRI without this line!
EndSection
After all that I finally have a working, albeit slow, AIGLX+Beryl desktop. :D