ATI driver problems. LinuxMCE 1.1B2 on Kubuntu Feisty

[martijn]

I've installed LinuxMCE 1.1B2 from cd (torrent) on a clean install of Kubuntu Feisty. The only things I installed were the updates and the ATI driver.

After the installation of LinuxMCE I've got a dialog box asking me if I want to start LinuxMCE of Kubuntu by default, and some settings like if I wanted tu use alpha blending.
During the test the alpha blending worked fine, but when I want to continue this dialogbox, It said it had some problems with the alpha blending and if I want the script to try and fix this. I answered yes... and that was tha last thing I could do on the machine.

Everytime when I start my PC I see the text of all the starting services, and on a certain point I still see the text, but the screen goes black, and than the text again, and black... and so on. Like switching between black and the text 1 time a second.
I get no graphical screen or dialog box. Though I do can access the web-interface.
Disabling the alpha blening and even disabling the whole X server from starting up doesn't fix this. The flickering is going to fast to be able to login in another box. The SSH service got some problems too. I can connect, enter my username, but not more.

Does anybody have a clue where to start looking or what this could be?

My hardware:
Asus M2A-VM HDMI motherboard. (690G chipset with onboard ATI X1250)
X2 5200+
2GB RAM
400GB SATAII hdd.
DVD-RW (IDE)

EDIT: Ok, I can start it! Yay! I think the problem was (and is) with the (newest) ATI driver. I reinstalled kubuntu and linuxmce. Before installing linuxmce I installed the ati driver and checked it. Then installed linuxmce and he destroyed my ati install! It was thrown away.
Then in the console I reinstalled the ati driver.. rebooted... and Kubuntu booted fine. Then I ran linuxmce and it did a lot of things, and guess what... yay..he totally rewrote my xorg.conf and replaced it with a versions without all the stuff I put into it.
Now I reinstalled the ati driver again... and it does work, but not with opengl support. aargh. Ok this one I think I can fix myself... I'm getting an advanced ati driver installer, already did it 7 times today :S
Is this normal behavior? Or do I have to put some special things in it so it doesn't destroy the driver everytime?

[daath]

Yes, it was my experience also. LinuxMCE seems to be made to work only with Nvidia graphics cards. When you try to do stuff, it will overwrite xorg.conf with a lot of nonsense strange too that UI2 doesn't work with anything other than Nvidia - They are not the only graphics adapters that support alpha transparency ;P

We can conclude that LinuxMCE by NO MEANS is user-friendly or easy to install. In fact in my case absolutely *nothing* worked out of the box (here I am referring to the "demo" video)... My TV-cards and media sharing doesn't work either. Anyway. When I get a 48-72 hours free, I'll try to dedicate it to getting my MC to work with LinuxMCE. Damn thing is, I like the idea a lot, so I gotta try to get it to work.

I wonder when v1.2 is going out - Soon it will be a month over-due

[sharlee_angelo]

ATI cards are supporting composite extension for Xorg but not for linux, for the moment. i've read a how-to for installing latest ati drivers on ubuntu 7.04 and it was recommended to disable composite option.

[rhydewithdis]

I've got very similar problems and haven't been able to get past them. 

Installation of LME 1.1B2 on Kubuntu Fiesty 7.04, Dell E510 Machine with an ATI x850 card outputting via DVI to a 1080p panel. 

Clean installation of Kubuntu and once LME is installed, the entire UI fonts, etc. goes haywire and I can't make out any text on the screen (super tiny) and distorted.  That's it.  No clue how to get past this dilemma. 

And I was really looking forward to this... if anyone has any points, a howto move forward from here, I'd really appreciate.  Heck, I'd even paypal you $20 if you walked me through this via IM/phone. 

[rhydewithdis]

Bump. $20 offered: http://forum.linuxmce.com/index.php?topic=1810.msg8213#msg8213

[royw]

Same problem (text screen, blank, repeat) on Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H with 690G chipset running xorg vesa driver.  I didn't have sshd installed so only recovery was to reinstall kubuntu.  Time for install attempt #2...

[Zaerc]

I'm surprised you got Feisty to install at all on a SATA drive.  I had to use Kubuntu Gutsy Tribe-1 because of SATA driver issues with this mainboard, maybe I gave up to quick.

Beating the ATI/AMD proprietary drivers into submisson wasn't easy, there seem to be to much scripts, tools and utilities fighting over the config file.  I ended up doing a: "sudo chmod 444 /etc/X11/xorg.conf" after editing it by hand, we'll see how well that holds up.  So far I've gotten UI1 and UI2 with masking to work.

I have made a wiki page for the Asus M2A-VM, It's not much yet, but I'm hoping other people with this motherboard will expand it a bit with their experience too.

Maybe we should set one up specifically for the problems with the ATI drivers as well?  Probably won't be to hard to come up with a universal xorg.conf template that works on most setups.  If you like I could post mine here for now as an example.

[Zaerc]

Some links that might come in handy:

http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/linux-radeon.html
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Troubleshooting

[Zaerc]

To answer your edit, yes this seems to be normal. I have tried setting it to read-only, but that didn't stop the scripts from destroying a working setup either.

And if a "helper" script offers to fix things for you... better say no, also funny how it starts the MD anyway when you hit cancel in that dialog (contrary to the message).  As far as I can tell this is the only issue that really needs fixing before LMCE can hit the big time.