[SOLVED] Integrated ATI RadeonTM 1250 and UI2 issue

[indulis]

Thom,

Thanks for that info on the 6200.  It was slow at UI2 with Alpha.

But I *do* want to get the ATI video working before I give up entirely.  As I see it, working on, reporting,. reproducing, and testing a problem is a contribution to what is a great project.

That and the fact that if I can get rid of another card that is another couple of watts saved!

Colin- yes I know I am causing myself grief, but if I can get the ATI working maybe the solution will help make LinuxMCE more applicable to more hardware.  The ATI drivers load up and fgl_glxgears gives me 500 fps.  If it didn't work AT ALL I'd just give up, but the frustrating thing is that I can see the UI there, there is just something else that paints black over the top of it!   So I get it see it for a flash then it vanishes! I suspect the photo screensaver.  It is sooo close to working.  I can even bodge my way into Mythtv and I can see flashes of the Mythtv main menu. 

What I will do tonight is reload from scratch, install the latest ATI drivers, and run in UI1 for a while, knowing that I can go to UI2 when I want some more pain and suffering.  I'll also put in a bug report.  If anyone picks it up I can go back to UI2.  Because I have gone as far as I can with it now (oh, apart from physically removing my Nvidia card from the system).  I'll also do a final check of my xorg.conf before I give up and go to UI1.

The rotten thing is that the photos that play on UI2 as the screensaver show that the ATI has great quality video.

And we really *should* do the right thing by ATI as they are doing a lot to open up their hardware to Linux.  If we can give them a leg up over Nvidia then maybe eventually Nvidia will hand over their device programming specs too.  If we all give up now we reward proprietary, and punish open source.  So it is worth a bit of pain and effort from me. 

Now if only I can get someone that knows the LinuxMCE graphics code to also buy into trying to fix the issue- or at least diagnose it to the point that we know if it should be raised as an ATI bug.  Because I am not going to become a graphics programmer.

Is there any way to turn off the photo screensaver?  At least I could narrow down the cause, as I don't think it is the main LinuxMCE UI, as that runs OK.

PS is there a quick and easy way to change from UI1 to UI2 without having to go through the AV wizard?  I am happy to edit system files!

[colinjones]

Actually I meant when using the nVidia chipset. But no matter, I agree that in principle we should be trying to open up the hardware options and thus open source more generally.

Yes, there is a way to disable the PSS - can't remember what it is, but I'm sure disabling the device in the web admin would do just as well.

Sorry, can't help you with the UI1/2 question

[nite_man]

Maybe I missed something but in my case ATI RadeonTM 1250 works pretty well with open source drivers. I just installed them using wiki page and that's it. Moreover, my friend tried proprietary ATI drivers to be able pass sound over HDMI. With sound is ok. But video is not visible. So, if you don't need sound use open source drivers.

[indulis]

Thanks Michael- you used the instructions here on the LinuxMCE wiki, right? And UI2 worked- with alpha blending or overlay?
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Display_Drivers

But these are for the proprietary driver- fglrx, so where were the details you used for the open source "radeon" or "radeonhd" driver?

[nite_man]

Thanks Michael- you used the instructions here on the LinuxMCE wiki, right? And UI2 worked- with alpha blending or overlay?
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Display_Drivers

But these are for the proprietary driver- fglrx, so where were the details you used for the open source "radeon" or "radeonhd" driver?

My mistake. Sure it's for fglrx. That box works fine with both UI1 and UI2 with overlay (no alpha blending). But with fglrx driver there is no sound over HDMI. So, to fix that we tried the latest ATI Catalyst. Not sure about the current status of that. But sound was passed via HDMI.

[deffcon]

Hi,

Recently bought an asus m2a-vm hdmi, now i had this md connected with vga no problems, i even managed ( this i will update in the wiki ) to install the ati 8.10 ( not the 8.11 because of an bug ) with all gui options in the v2 ui, but now connected the x1250 onboard hdmi with an hdmi cable to my new television an samsung le40a656a1fxxc, used the xorg.conf of Andrew earlier in this post, all good, bios screen, linux booting off diskless until loading the fglrx drivers, i get an black screen and my tv says searching for devices, this goes good, then my tv says searching for signals and this is the point where it goes wrong, my tv says after the searching for signals after 5 secs, NO SIGNAL, my tv isn't broken, if i connect my hp 8510P laptop with hdmi i get an image and what i said ealier all good until loading the fglrx drivers, am i missing something, oh for i forget, second senario, removed xorg.conf from /etc/X11 rebooted with /usr/pluto/bin/RebootWithAVWizard.sh noting happened, looked like my md is in sort of locked state of the video signal what i DONT have, if reset the md hard with the reset button on the machine all good back to square one, i get the AVWizard, checked DVI/HDMI, checked 1080P ( Tv is Full HD 1080P ) and 60 hz i get an picture but very distorted but the fonts are very readable better then with vga, guys help me out please.

Thnx in advance,

Dave

[indulis]

More than likely the xorg.conf file which is being used does not match what your TV expects as an input, and/or the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file is not putting the video signal out of the HDMI connector.  LMCE has a (very) annoying habit of overwriting your own xorg.conf file with what it thinks is a good one, and it does this at reboot.  I have not figured out how to make it stop in a nice way, so I hacked the script that does this to instead copy your own working version of xorg.conf over the one in /etc/X11

In my opinion, this is an example of what I think is LMCE's biggest issue.  It was originally written for a single known hardware, software. and configuration setup, and is not that well suited to being let loose in a world of varied equipment and people and configurations.  Not because it has a major deficiency, but because the assumptions it makes about living on an appliance and the "LMCE knows better so I am going to reconfigure your display/mythtv etc for you" attitude makes it very hard for people to get it going when they hit problems with new hardware (e.g. different xorg.conf file required) or software or setup. 

A problem that would be minor and easily rectified in a plain Linux system (or one with Mythtv on it) turns into a long drawn out problem analysis which for me has often ended with finding out that LMCE was fiddling about behind the scenes with things which I had fixed.  So not only did I have to fix the original problem but also try to stop LMCE.

Anyway enough about that, here is the modified part of /usr/pluto/bin/Xconfigure.sh

Lines beginning with ->start indulis and finishing at the line @<- end indulis

Once you've finished modifying it, you can make your modifications to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.working and these will be copied at reboot to /etc/X11/xorg.conf instead of LMCE's idea of what a working xorg.conf looks like.  I had issues because the AV Wizard created an xorg.conf that drove my CRT monitor bats (out of frequency range I think).

First, copy the original file to /usr/pluto/bin/Xconfigure.sh.orig

sudo cp /usr/pluto/bin/Xconfigure.sh /usr/pluto/bin/Xconfigure.sh.orig

Then edit the /usr/pluto/bin/Xconfigure.sh file

#nVidia modeline, driver bug workaround
Modeline_640x480_60='"640x480" 25.18 640 656 752 800 480 490 492 525'

. /usr/pluto/bin/pluto.func
. /usr/pluto/bin/Config_Ops.sh
. /usr/pluto/bin/Utils.sh
. /usr/pluto/bin/LockUtils.sh
. /usr/pluto/bin/X-Common.sh

#-> start indulis
# ConfigFile="/etc/X11/xorg.conf"
ConfigFile="/etc/X11/xorg.conf.dummy"
Output="VGA"
# copy back working xorg.conf instead
cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.working /etc/X11/xorg.conf
#<- end indulis


DEVICECATEGORY_Video_Cards=125
DEVICEDATA_Setup_Script=189
DEVICEDATA_Connector=68
DEVICEDATA_TV_Standard=229

There may be a "nice" way to turn off the constant overwrite of xorg.conf but I couldn't find it.  I tried an "exit 0" at the beginning of the script but it did not work for me.  IMHO there should be a global setting which tells *ALL* of LMCE's background "rewrite your configuration file" scripts to back off.

Good luck!

[nite_man]

Strange. In my case I just installed  the latest fglrx, connected the ASUS P2-M2A690G to TV using HDMI cable and run AVWizard. I set 1080p resolution and UI2 with overlay (not transparent). That's it. After that  MD displayed video without any problems.

[deffcon]

Hi,

on what kernel are you running with the latest fgklrx.

Dave

[seth]

Question, as you have been down this road nite_man. Now you just followed the instructions in the wiki page mentioned here, or did you download something different, than what is available to apt-get ?

I ask, because my new motherboard has native ATI graphics. I wish to try this out, if it goes south, I have an Nvidia 7200 card I can install in the pci-e slot.

Thanks,

Seth

[hari]

When I start Linuxmce orbiter, I get the menus, but once the photo slideshow starts, the menus disappear behind the photos.  They blink on, then the photo seems to overlay them.  I get into TV, and when I press the mouse right button I get glimpses of Mythtv behind the black screen- it blinks on then gets overlaid with black again.

i'm having the same issue with an AMD780 integrated. Looks like either our window manager freaks out or overlay does not work.

br, Hari

[tschak909]

the driver isn't applying the mask.

-Thom

[indulis]

Thom,

if this is an ATI problem, what can we do to take the next step so that they fix their driver?  I would like to use the integrated Radeon on my motherboard (for tree hugging hippy reasons to save CO2, if no other).

How do we get sufficient information to show that it is their driver and get a test case for them to use to fix their driver?

[tschak909]

Good question, I've not interacted with ATI or NVIDIA on matters of their drivers... I will spend some time looking at our rendering classes to see if we can do a workaround.

-Thom

[indulis]

Thom- it would be better to try to get ATI to fix their code, no?  So a testcase we could send to ATI would get this started. Let me know if you need a victim system with the problem, I can install a new LMCE on another partition with the ATI drivers.