On Mon, 7 Apr 2014 18:43:11 +0100 mick mbm@rlogin.net wrote:
On Mon, 7 Apr 2014 17:39:19 +0100 Chris Walker alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk allegedly wrote:
mick mbm@rlogin.net allegedly wrote:
And of course I should ask whether you have tried the OSS radeon driver before using the proprietary fglrx driver. Given that you seem to have a card which is fairly old, that driver may support it. I don't know that, but maybe someone else on the list has an old HD card and can give advice.
I haven't tried it, no.
I'd be happy to try anything that works ;-)
I've just checked the apt repository for the "xserver-xorg-video-radeon" driver and it says:
"This package provides the 'radeon' driver for the AMD/ATI cards. The following chips should be supported: R100, RV100, RS100, RV200, RS200, RS250, R200, RV250, RV280, RS300, RS350, RS400/RS480, R300, R350, R360, RV350, RV360, RV370, RV380, RV410, R420, R423/R430, R480/R481, RV505/RV515/RV516/RV550, R520, RV530/RV560, RV570/R580, RS600/RS690/RS740, R600, RV610/RV630, RV620/RV635, RV670, RS780/RS880, RV710/RV730, RV740/RV770/RV790, CEDAR, REDWOOD, JUNIPER, CYPRESS, HEMLOCK, PALM, SUMO/SUMO2, BARTS, TURKS, CAICOS, CAYMAN, ARUBA."
So if your HD4670 uses one of those chipsets (it may be the RV730) it looks like you are good to go by simply installing that driver from your (RPM) repo. It may not give you 3D acceleration, but at least you should get a working system again.
I'd suggest that you try that before going further down the fglrx compilation rabbit hole.
The card uses RV710/RV730 but if I check the list of installed software, it shows this 'x11-driver-video-ati' as already being installed. But I still can't persuade the system to display the correct settings.
While checking the software list, I did notice that the the firmware for the Radeon card wasn't installed so I've added that and have rebooted, just in case.
It hasn't made any difference though. I can set the desktop settings by means of an icon on the task bar. If I go to that, it says the Window Manager isn't running. So I ran kwin and now most of the icons on the taskbar have gone to be replaced by crosses.
The next thing I think I'll do is a backup. The last one I have is just before I did the upgrade from Mageia3 to 4. Once that's done, I'll investigate what's gone wrong and see what I can do about it. I have to confess that I'm giving serious thought to getting rid of Mageia altogether in favour of something else. It wouldn't solve the issue of the Radeon card directly as it won't change the hardware but it might at least be better supported in another distro.
Anyway, enough chit chat. I have to take my grandson swimming now so computing will have to wait.
Thanks very much for your help.