CentOS 7, ATI Card, 30″ Monitor

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Well, I got my user back to being able to use his system, but I’ve still got one issue: it’s running on the VESA driver – there is *no* Catalyst build for this monitor, for CentOS 7. From a lot of googling, nothing’s been done since the summer of ’14 (lspci reports it as a FirePro V3900).

Any thoughts, or pointers, as to if/how I can get X – he’s running KDE –
to see the full width of the monitor, not just about 4″ less, or is that not possible with the VESA driver?

mark

10 thoughts on - CentOS 7, ATI Card, 30″ Monitor

  • John R Pierce wrote:

    Yes, to start with. It gags – that’s what I posted recently, that the only font is almost 100% unreadable, and I can’t get the controls to do anything. And, you’ll note, that’s from last year. And if you go to the main link, that you posted, and try to “find your card”, and put in the card info, what happens when you hit “search” is that the topmost dropdown box is back to “choose”, meaning they don’t have one. Btw, I spoke to Dell
    – this box is theirs, but of course the people supporting workstations
    *still* don’t have a clue about Linux, unlike the server people, and they couldn’t find a recent driver, either.

    I *really* dislike ATI/AMD video. At least with NVidia, the proprietary driver builder *always* works, once you’ve got the right one, whatever folks bitch and moan about it.

    mark

  • Have you considered using the elrepo packaged version, or at least reading their pages to see which chips are still supported by the proprietary driver?
    For me their (elrepo) packages seem the sanest way to manage an EL system with either nvidia or ati/amd proprietary driver. Also there are some notes on this page relating to a change in X protocol on EL 6 which caused some grief there, perhaps EL 7 has that same change and thus you may be in the list of ” older chipsets”.
    At least by reading the pages you might be able to quicker come to the conclusion that the proprietary driver will no longer work for you?
    http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-fglrx http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-fglrx-legacy

    Even when this disclaimer is not here:
    I am not a contracting officer. I do not have authority to make or modify the terms of any contract.

  • Denniston, Todd A CIV NAVSURFWARCENDIV Crane wrote:

    Yep. They got nothing for CentOS 7.

    Btw, we got him the full width by changing the cable, from DVI-I to DVI-D
    (dual link). Then he had to change it back to not recognizing the full width of the screen via the control ctr, because when it did, everything was distorted – circles were ovals, etc.

    I suppose I’ll get around to writing him a xorg.conf at some time.

    mark

  • Mark, with the FirePro V3900 the ‘radeon’ driver should be loading, not the VESA one. Is xorg-x11-drv-ati installed? I am running a FirePro M7820 in my Dell Precision M6500, and everything ‘Just Works’ with the xorg-x11-drv-ati package (and its dependencies) installed. I even get triple monitor support at 1920×1200 while docked, using the dual DisplayPort outputs on the dock, on two 24″ Dell monitors plus the M6500’s 17″ display. For using a projector, the DisplayPort connector on the laptop works fine, even hotplug works. I have been very pleased for the most part; there are a few artifacts in Thunderbird, like lines disappear until scrolled, but that might be a Thunderbird issue, and it doesn’t happen often.

    For my FirePro M7820, here’s the lspci output:
    01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
    [AMD/ATI] Broadway XT [Mobility Radeon HD 5870]
    01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Juniper HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5700 Series]

    Are you sure you’re actually using the VESA drivers? The Turks chip used in the V3900 shows as being supported (‘man radeon’ will give you a list of supported chips).

    Check /var/log/Xorg.0.log and see what’s going on.

    Wolfy is working on the latest Catalyst drivers for ELrepo for EL7
    (fglrx 15.9 as I recall). There are some challenges, and the kmod-fglrx package is still in testing. But as well as the open radeon driver is supporting my M7820 I’m not sure I want to change at this point. There would have to be some compelling reason.

  • Lamar Owen wrote:

    Yup:
    rpm -qa | grep drv-ati xorg-x11-drv-ati-7.4.0-1.20140918git56c7fb8.el7.x86_64

    Note that, as I said earlier, it is over a year old.

    This is, according to what I google, a 27″, and it’s black for what could well be 1.5″ on either side… which makes it 24″….

    02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
    Turks GL [FirePro V3900]
    02:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
    Turks/Whistler HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 6000 Series]

    Did. I am *not* going to paste in almost 3,000 lines (what a *useful*
    logfile… NOT!), but the relevant lines, I believe, are
    [ 18.760] (EE) open /dev/fb0: No such file or directory
    [ 18.760] (WW) Falling back to old probe method for fbdev
    [ 18.760] (II) Loading sub module “fbdevhw”
    [ 18.760] (II) LoadModule: “fbdevhw”
    [ 18.760] (II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/libfbdevhw.so
    [ 18.760] (II) Module fbdevhw: vendor=”X.Org Foundation”
    [ 18.760] compiled for 1.15.0, module version = 0.0.2
    [ 18.760] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 15.0
    [ 18.760] (EE) open /dev/fb0: No such file or directory
    [ 18.760] (EE) Screen 0 deleted because of no matching config section.
    [ 18.760] (II) UnloadModule: “radeon”
    [ 18.760] (EE) Screen 0 deleted because of no matching config section.
    [ 18.760] (II) UnloadModule: “modesetting”
    [ 18.760] (EE) Screen 0 deleted because of no matching config section.
    [ 18.760] (II) UnloadModule: “fbdev”
    [ 18.760] (II) UnloadSubModule: “fbdevhw”
    [ 18.760] (II) Loading sub module “vbe”
    [ 18.760] (II) LoadModule: “vbe”
    [ 18.760] (II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/libvbe.so
    [ 18.803] (II) Module vbe: vendor=”X.Org Foundation”
    [ 18.803] compiled for 1.15.0, module version = 1.1.0
    [ 18.803] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 15.0
    [ 18.803] (II) Loading sub module “int10”
    [ 18.803] (II) LoadModule: “int10″
    [ 18.803] (II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/libint10.so
    [ 18.805] (II) Module int10: vendor=”X.Org Foundation”
    [ 18.805] compiled for 1.15.0, module version = 1.0.0
    [ 18.805] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 15.0
    [ 18.805] (II) VESA(0): initializing int10
    [ 18.806] (II) VESA(0): Primary V_BIOS segment is: 0xc000
    [ 18.806] (II) VESA(0): VESA BIOS detected

    Followed by many, many lines that begin with VESA.

    That’s why I said that at some point I was going to hand-craft an xorg.conf. Do you know if there’s a way to dump the current settings to a file? I know I can do it with NVidia, but this is just KDE’s settings.

    Thanks for the info – I’m looking forward to that.

    mark

  • The more useful lines are likely before this, showing AIGLX getting loaded and glamoregl getting loaded.

    If you can get the ati driver to load it should work fine.

  • Last I knew, you could
    1) go into multi user mode (no x running)
    systemctl isolate multi-user #graphical is probably the default
    2) Ask Xorg what it would do by default run ‘Xorg –config > mynewxorg.conf.file’ #this is IIRC without looking at man or Xorg –help
    #but I think you’ll get the idea here. :)
    3) go back to graphical systemctl isolate graphical

    hope this helps

    Even when this disclaimer is not here:
    I am not a contracting officer. I do not have authority to make or modify the terms of any contract.

  • Denniston, Todd A CIV NAVSURFWARCENDIV Crane wrote:

    Yeah, thanks. Googling, I found Xorg :1 –configure, and it crashed every time, so I was wondering if I had to be in runlevel 3 for that to work.

    mark