Issues with X on Sager NP4880

As the previous thread I started has been getting rather long, I figured i'd start a new thread.

Here's what we know so far. The 4880 has a nonstandard ATi Mobility x700 PCIE card with 256 MB of onboard VRAM instead of the 128. The ChipID is 5653 (I believe).

Using the proprietary drivers, and a Guide I found on the Fedora Forum, I was able to get the module installed, though it did take me a few tries and a bit of tweaking.

My original problem, I found out, was that the fglrx module had not been installed, I had actually skipped a step (the sh make_install.sh), but once the module was placed in its correct locations, I was able to start x, and get a black screen that I could not ctrl-alt-backspace out of. Earlier, when I had the backlight issue, I was able to add LVDS as an option on the monitor and that solved that, but now that the module was installed, i was getting a complete black screen, no picture at all. Luckily, I had set my preferred init to 3 before, knowing I would have some problems, so on a reboot I went in, found the section:

And switched it to:

And lo and behold, I get the graphical splendor of my plain black desktop. So I proceed to open a window, type in glxinfo, and I get some info about having MESA drivers being used. I'm at work, so I cant give you the exact info. So I did an lsmod | grep fglrx, and the module wasnt loaded at all, which now that I think about it could be because I havent finished installing the module in all the right locations. Either way, I cant play video files or anything on the mesa driver, so even if I cant get DRI at this point, I just want the fglrx driver to load.

My xorg.conf

and my Xorg.0.log

If anyone has any ideas, or just wants to throw out some random guesses, go for it.

Odd, try pasting the link in the address bar, that fixed it for me.

Oh, and Ive found another issue, one which may explain why the fglrx driver wont load.

Thats in the bottom, near the end of the Xorg.0.log file.

I may have solved the problem, but I wont know until tonight when I get home to test it. I have been keeping track of this site set out to run Mandriva on a Clevo m400a (sager np4880) and all he could get to run was the vesa driver as well. Just for giggles, I decided to see if there had been any progres... and apparenlty he's running the fglrx drivers on it, with screenshots of fgl_glxgears and everything.

This has my hopes soaring, for those of you with x700 cards and cant get x to work, maybe this'll help.

http://www.viajes-abaco.com/m400a/m400a.htm#x

I get home in about two hours, so i'll let you guys know how it works out.

Complete failure, haha. Since then, Ive tried Ubuntu again, but had more issues getting the base system set up (installs default image of kernek 386 when I wanted 686, such a hassle getting it to compile my ethernet drivers in 686, sound didnt work...)

So today, I shall be downloading Mandriva and i'm going to try and match my config to the author of the page I linked. The link was bad, however, because if you link to specific portions for some reason it puts you to the 8880 page. The real link is at http://www.viajes-abaco.com/m400a/. So in the next few days i'll give mandriva a go, see if it works. If I can get a good feel of DRI on there, maybe I'll be able to port it to another Distro of choice.

Wish me luck.

Some updates:

I chose Mandriva 2005 LE, and the install went nice, detected and configured everything except the graphics card. It appears to be a KDE-Centric distro, but comes with several DEs, I chose to install Gnome, though im used to the 2.10 version, and having to go back to 2.8 was a bit weird. So far I have found no way of upgrading to 2.10 unless I want to do the full upgrade and go to cooker, but that would include moving to GCC4, and thus defeating the purpose of going to this distro.

So far, I have matched my config exactly to the authors, and have been in some email discussions with him, but have yet to fix my issue. I have, however, probably found out what's causing it. After checking several forums, notably Rage3d, i was linked to the ATi Bugzilla Page.

ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=146

This appears to be exactly the problem im having, down to the T. One of the comments was by someone with a thinkpad, and a link to his site. He posted a log with the fix and without, and the log without the fix darn near matches mine word for word. However, the proposed "fix" is to pass a "mem=768m" or lower line to the kernel at boot, limiting it. So far, I havent gotten this approach to work, though i havent really tried at it yet.

Frosted, is there any way you can test this out on your Gentoo box and see if this will help you out any? According to the guy im in contact with, you CAN get DRI working on our machine, so my hopes are high, but both of us have over a gig of ram, and this "fix" just severely limits our performance.

Hopefully ATI will have this issue patched in the next version of the driver, which should be out early-mid next month.

Yes with the external monitor. I even tried Fn-F7 to switch displays with and without the monitor attatched.

The video ram one is intriguing, maybe i should set it at 128 since thats the normal amount. How do I specify that?

VideoRam = "128"?

And I have both agpgart and intel-agp loaded as modules before I load fglrx, and fglrx is being used by them.

Which agp settings in xorg.conf are you referring to?

Thanks for the ideas!

The ram is measured in MB or KB?

Also, I think im going to take the leap to Gentoo soon, probably start with a stage3 or 2, depending on how lucky I feel and how much time i'm going to have. Maybe sunday or monday. I'll start a thread when I start it and keep everyone posted.