[clug] Debain Squeeze + Raedon 6450

[Francis James Whittle]

Hi Kevin,

That Wiki page — seriously out of date.  The only things from value in
it are:

aptitude install firmware-linux-nonfree
aptitude install libgl1-mesa-dri

and a little bit rebuilding the kernel, but seriously, AGP?  

This sounds a lot like trying to load up a KMS driver without KMS kernel
support.

If you could say what version of the kernel you're running, possibly
along with those x11 logs (and a dmesg dump if you can) it would help,
but I'd suggest at least that you should grab the 3.2 kernel, x server,
mesa drivers, and libdrm2 (and libdrm-radeon1) from squeeze-backports.  

apt-get install -t squeeze-backports linux-image-3.2.0-0.bpo.2-amd64 xserver-xorg-video-ati libdrm2 libdrm-radeon1 libgl1-mesa-dri

That should give you an up-to-date-enough system (it _could_ use newer
versions of mesa and libdrm, but pulling from unstable is only for the
brave), and if you make sure that all traces of the Catatonic drivers
are removed it should give you a good starting point, and potentially a
good finishing point.  You may also need to make sure the radeon module
is loaded in your initramfs, although I believe that should be taken
care of automatically now.

Cheers,
Francis

On Sat, 2012-03-17 at 15:32 +1100, Kevin Murray wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> My trusty old Ubuntu 10.04 production install finally died today (it's been
> on it's last legs for a while), and i've resuscitated a squeeze (6.04)
> partion i was playing around with a month or so ago. My current desktop has
> a graphics card with the Radeon HD 6450 chip (ASUS, 1gb ddr3). I couldn't
> get the free drivers working in squeeze over summer, and so install the
> proprietary Catalyst drivers. This gave my the native 1920x1080 resolution,
> but the speed was abysmal so i uninstalled and retried the free drivers, to
> no avail.
> 
> Does anyone know how to get the OS drivers working? The problem i'm facing
> is this:
> On boot, the ususal kernel/init output proceeds normally, but when it
> reaches the stage where GDM would normally be shown, the screen turns blank
> except for a flickering cursor marker in the far top left corner. If one
> holds (not presses) ctrl-alt-F1, then the contents which would normally be
> shown on tty1 (i.e. kernel/init output followed by login prompt at the
> bottom of the screen) flickers up, as though one was rapidly switching from
> the blank screen to tty1.
> 
> To get to this stage, i followed http://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo pretty
> much to the letter, after uninstalling the catalyst driver. I remember last
> time i hit a dead end with regards to the kernel not supporting KMS if that
> helps (firmware-linux and firmware-linux-nonfree are installed)
> 
> I can attach x11 logs if you would like.
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Kevin