Ubuntu and ATI

Yesterday, my son said he wanted to setup a dual boot Linux partition on his desktop. First, I was wondering where he had heard about that. He is quite the computer user, but not much of a hacker. Apparently, he has some friends that are quite into it, and he's been enjoying the conversations.

So, I grabbed my last Mandrake download, and discovered that it was over a year old. We talked about grabbing the latest Mandriva release, but he said that his friend uses Ubuntu, so we grabbed that. After fighting with the CD burner, we had the install CD ready. By then, it was 10:00pm, so I only stayed long enough to help him through the partitioning steps, and then went to bed.

In the morning, he had a screen that was blank except for a small underline character in the top left corner. I should mention that his machine has two video adapters: the onboard Intel video, and an ATI Radeon 9200SE. We put in the ATI so that he could run video games.

I dug around the web a little, and found that the video configuration is found in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. I found that the ATI driver is called fglrx, so I tried that. It didn't work because it wasn't installed on the machine. A little more digging found that the default driver is called vesa, and it supports most cards - although not all resolutions or features. I put this in, and we have video!

Here is a snippet of /etc/X11/xorg.conf before the change:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Corporation 82810 CGC [Chipset Graphics Controller]"
Driver "i810"
BusID "PCI:0:1:0"
EndSection

And after:

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI 9200 SE Radeon"
Driver "vesa"
BusID "PCI:1:14:0"
EndSection

I changed the identifier just for commenting purposes. You may also notice that I had to change the BusID. While it makes sense to me that each card has an ID, I have no idea how to tell what that ID is. Lucky for me, the X system spits out some pretty detailed log files that contain informative error messages. I found the correct BusID in one of the log files.

Later, we're going to install an ATI specific driver that should give him access to greater resolution and faster operation. Watch for a later post.