[gentoo-user] ATI drivers

[Daniel D Jones]

I have an ATI Radeon 9600 XT driving dual monitors.  I had the setup working 
fine with the ati-driver binary drivers - single desktop spanning the two 
monitors with xinerama.  Dialog boxes appeared in the center of whichever 
monitor I was on.  Maximizing a window maximized it to the monitor, not the 
full desktop.

A few weeks back, an upgrade to the ati-driver package broke the setup.  The 
monitor running on the DVI output quit displaying.  When I started X, I'd get 
the left screen, running on the VGA output.  X thought the right screen was 
there - the mouse would disappear to that side, I could move windows over 
there, etc. but I had no display.  When I first boot up, I get a mirrored 
text display - the same output on both monitors. After he upgrade to the 
ati-drivers, I'd get that on initial bootup but once I started X, the right 
monitor was asleep until I rebooted.  Dropping out of X didn't wake it back 
up.

After a bit of fiddling and digging and Googling, I put a line in package.mask 
to block the new version of ati-drivers, unmerged and re-emerged the package 
and got my desktop back working just as it should.  At some point, however, 
the blocked packages interfered with other packages and their dependencies.  
By this time, an even newer version of ati-drivers had come out.  I commented 
out the line in package.mask and allowed ati-drivers to upgrade.  I didn't, 
at that time, restart X and everything continued to work fine.  This weekend, 
I needed to do some other maintenance on the box and had to reboot.  I lost 
my right monitor again.

After more fiddling and digging and Googling, I gave up and tried to downgrade 
ati-drivers again.  When I uncommented the line in package.mask, however, I 
couldn't emerge the package - it told me all versions were masked.  
Evidently, the old version I was using has been removed.

I gave up on ati-drivers, unmerged it and compiled the open source kernel 
radeon driver.  I tried to follow the directions here:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Dual_Monitors#With_the_Open_Source_Drivers

but they're broken or at least unclear.  After a great deal of futzing with my 
xorg.conf, I have my display largely back.  There are two issues remainging, 
however.  

First, xinerama doesn't appear to be working, or to be only partially working.  
It appears to not realize that there are two monitors.  Dialog boxes pop up 
in the middle of the virtual display, meaning half the box is on one screen 
and half on the other.  A maximized windows covers the full display - both 
screens.  I'll paste my xorg.conf in at the bottom of the message.  I set the 
xinerama use flag when I first went to dual monitors with the ati-drivers 
package several months ago.  The currently installed packages are compiled 
with it enabled.  Also, note that I don't particularly care if acceleration 
is working or not.  This is primarily a work machine.

The second issue is that several packages seem to think they depend on 
ati-drivers.  I don't believe this is a hard dependency, since I don't think 
that cdroast, for example, only works on machines with an ATI video card.  
I've checked and can't find any sort of useflag which might be triggering the 
issue.  But I'm getting this:

root@Merlin:/home/ddjones # emerge -uDvat world

These are the packages that would be merged, in reverse order:

Calculating world dependencies -
!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy ">=x11-drivers/ati-drivers-8.27.10" have 
been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- x11-drivers/ati-drivers-8.27.10-r1 (masked by: package.mask)
- x11-drivers/ati-drivers-8.28.8 (masked by: package.mask, ~x86 keyword)
- x11-drivers/ati-drivers-8.29.6 (masked by: package.mask, ~x86 keyword)

For more information, see MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge man page or
refer to the Gentoo Handbook.



!!! Problem resolving dependencies for kde-base/kompare
!!! Depgraph creation failed.

I could unmask the ati-drivers from my package.mask but I don't want the 
driver installed (unless someone can offer a suggestion as to how to fix the 
sleepy monitor problem.)  I couldn't load the kernel radeon manager until I 
unmerged the ati-drivers package.

Any ideas or suggestions on either of these two probmes would be greatly 
appreciated.

Heres' my xorg.conf:

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier     "Default Layout"
	Screen         "Screen 0" 0 0
	Screen         "Screen 1" LeftOf "Screen 0"
	InputDevice    "Generic Keyboard"
	InputDevice    "Configured Mouse"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
	Option       "Xinerama" "On"
EndSection

Section "Files"
	FontPath     "unix/:7100"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/100dpi"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/75dpi"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/TTF"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/Type1"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/artwiz"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/corefonts"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/cyrillic"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/default"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/dejavu"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/freefont"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/local"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/misc"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/sharefonts"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/terminus"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/ttf-bitstream-vera"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/ukr"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/util"
EndSection

Section "Module"
	Load  "bitmap"
	Load  "dbe"
	Load  "ddc"
	Load  "dri"
	Load  "extmod"
	Load  "freetype"
	Load  "glx"
	Load  "int10"
	Load  "record"
	Load  "type1"
	Load  "vbe"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Generic Keyboard"
	Driver      "kbd"
	Option	    "CoreKeyboard"
	Option	    "XkbModel" "pc104"
	Option	    "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Configured Mouse"
	Driver      "mouse"
	Option	    "CorePointer"
	Option	    "Device" "/dev/psaux"
	Option	    "Protocol" "auto"
	Option	    "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
	Option	    "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier   "Monitor 0"
	Modeline "1680x1050" 146.2 1680 1784 1960 2240 1050 1053 1059 1089
	Option	    "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier   "Monitor 1"
	Modeline "1680x1050" 119 1680 1728 1760 1840 1050 1053 1059 1080
	Option	    "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Adapter 0"
	Driver      "radeon"
	BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
	Option      "DynamicClocks" "On"
	Option      "MerdgedFB" "true"
	Option      "CRT2Position" "LeftOf"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Adapter 1"
	Driver      "radeon"
	BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen 0"
	Device     "Adapter 0"
	Monitor    "Monitor 0"
	DefaultDepth     24
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport  0 0
		Depth     24
		Virtual 3360 1050
		Modes     "1680x1050" 
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen 1"
	Device     "Adapter 1"
	Monitor    "Monitor 1"
	DefaultDepth     24
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport  0 0
		Virtual   3360 1050
		Depth     24
		Modes     "1680x1050" 
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
	Mode         0666
EndSection


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