X crashes with Radeon 9700 Mobility

[lars_eivind]

I have just installed Mandrake 10.0 Official on my new Centrino laptop. The install finds my Radeon 9700 Mobility, and I can even choose 3D acceleration during the install. When I choose to test the configuration, everything seems fine.

However, when I log in and start X, KDE starts fine, but after a few seconds inside KDE X crashes.

Is this a known ATi bug?Can I do anything about it myself?

I'd like to try the official ATi drivers, but it would be nice to get KDE working so that I can download them. Is there something in the XF86-Config that I can change easily so that X uses a generic ATi driver (2D), like the "nv"-driver for NVidia-cards?

[coverup]

The radeon driver that comes with XFree86 should give you a decent 2D graphics. For some reason, on my system, Xdrake did not configure radeon driver properly, when I tried it (MDK9.2). This trick worked: boot from a knoppix CD, then compare your XF86Config-4 with the one that Knoppix creates, and edit the section relevant to your graphics card to use the radeon driver. Then reboot.

 

Before rebooting make sure that you boot into console (edit /etc/inittab to set init level to 3). From console, you will be able to play with X without rebooting, in case X crashes/does not start. From console, X is started with startx command. You can also try other window managers, and see if any of them work. And of course, you can download and install the ATI driver.

 

By the way, wih the radeon driver shipped with Knoppix even 3D acceleration works, but it does not work with the radeon driver shipped with Mandrake. Even funnier, with Knoppix glxgears give 1600FPS vs 1300FPS with Mandrake's ATI driver.