Whirlpool

Hi.

I got my toshiba laptop (Tecra A7) it comes with an ATI X1600 video card.

Damn ATI and their crap linux support.

Currently the card only works in VESA (800x600) and I can't enjoy my 1680x1050 screen...
Any idea on how I could get around it?
google only give me that "no X1600 drivers for ATI" line

JY

What's your xorg.conf content?

jya writes...

Hi.

I got my toshiba laptop (Tecra A7) it comes with an ATI X1600 video card.

Damn ATI and their crap linux support.

Currently the card only works in VESA (800x600) and I can't enjoy my 1680x1050 screen...
Any idea on how I could get around it?
google only give me that "no X1600 drivers for ATI" line

Hi i just read this on another forum about ati cards and linux.

ATI’s R5xx line (which is comprised by X1300, X1600, X1800 and X1900 cards) are NOT supported under Linux. period. People are complaining bitterly www.driverheaven.net/~pete/article5.htm but ATI does not seem to care or take notice. Its the same old story... year after year.... ATI said they would improve driver support, but in reality, nothing has changed.

All of nvidia's cards are supported under Linux. Infact, the 7800GS was even support by the 8178 driver before its release! If I am correct, we had official support for that card even before windows users. tell me when that last happened with ATI? Ehh?

So, my motto is: If ATI doesn't care about Linux, I don't care about ATI. Thus I have always actively encouraged people to purchase nvidia based cards and actively dissuaded people from buying ATI products.

Cheers Oldlucky

Oldlucky writes...

So, my motto is: If ATI doesn't care about Linux, I don't care about ATI.

Here, here :)

I was looking at a Tecra A6 but decided against it due to the dang ATI card.

Oldlucky writes...

If ATI doesn't care about Linux, I don't care about ATI

YEah, it's rather unfortunate as ATI offer with laptop is better than nvidia.
In the category of laptop I'm looking at, the best nvidia card you can get is the Go7400 which doesn't do too well in comparison to the X1600.

OTOH, with OS X, only ATI cards are supported :)
so may loose linux, but may gain OS X

Hopefully it won't be too long before ATI releases some drivers, they've improved their offering in the past few months ... their drivers keeps getting better and better with more frequent release
JY

When I bought my laptop none of the distributions I could use its native display resolution of 1280x800. Back then the first distribution that I managed to force to use its native resolution was SUSE Linux 9.2. I had to remove any set refresh rates in xorg.conf and let the driver work them out.

I'm interested to see the contents of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and your X logs (probably /var/log/Xorg.0.log).

Oldlucky writes...

ATI’s R5xx line (which is comprised by X1300, X1600, X1800 and X1900 cards) are NOT supported under Linux. period.

Not with the Ati drivers perhaps... but I think the native Xorg drivers may offer at least full 2D support.

From what I hear, their "soon to be released" drivers won't support your X1600 either. You have to wait for a few months. (???)

I'm not surprised by the reaction here to ATI.

What do you expect from a company who only provides support for those in the largest markets? (ie: Windows has a bigger share on the desktop than Linux, so we'll dedicate 50 of our folks writing drivers for that platform...Linux is small, I don't know, just task 5 people on that, who cares.)

That's the biggest difference between ATI and Nvidia...Nvidia will still provide drivers if you decide to try Linux, FreeBSD or even Solaris! (although, the Solaris ones are really for their Quadro line, it ain't hard to mod a few config files to make your Geforce be seen as a Quadro).

Its the main reason I stick to Nvidia cards. Driver support.

Without driver support, a video card is as useless as a gun without bullets. Clobbering people with the butt of the gun is equivalent to being forced to use VESA modes in Linux.

Sorry dude, but its gonna be like months until X1600 is supported. (If its ever supported)

What is the main resolution supported by the Xorg VESA driver?

I haven't been able to manage more than 800x600 :(

JY

Nobody can answer this simple question ???

The vesa manpage doesn't actually say, but I'm guessing it's all the modes defined in the VESA BIOS Extensions standard (PDF). According to that, it's various resolutions up to 1280x1024.