ATI Radeon xpress 200m drivers

[weziw]

Can someone please help me with my new FreeBSD install. I had fbsd6.1 installed and it installs xorg 6.9 by default. My laptop is an amd64 compaq presario v5303nr and it comes with the ati radeon xpress 200m video card. I was trying to run eclipse but it would not run and required xorg7.2 at least, so I did a cvsup and then a portupgrade -a which upgraded my xorg to 7.3 and also my gnome to 2.18. I resolved the dependency issues with the pkgdb -F but now I cant even startx to get gui up and running. I checked the log in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and it says towards the last line that there are no drivers for the ati graphics card. Does anyone know how I can install those?

[anomie]

... so I did a cvsup and then a portupgrade -a which upgraded my xorg to 7.3 and also my gnome to 2.18. I resolved the dependency issues with the pkgdb -F but now I cant even startx to get gui up and running.

The xorg upgrade to 7.{2,3} is a little involved. Have you read and followed the /usr/ports/UPDATING entry on this topic?

20070519:
AFFECTS: users of Xorg
AUTHOR: <email removed from post>

Welcome, fearless user! You are about to embark upon a mystical
journey to the world of xorg 7.2.
...

If not, I would start there. There is probably not a lot of use in starting with troubleshooting until you've completed that successfully.

[weziw]

I am glad you mentioned that because that is exactly what I followed! Firstly let me mention it all started because I wanted to use eclipse. Now eclipse requires at least gnome 2.18 and gnome requires xorg 7.2 at least. This is the third install. For the third install I started with a fresh fbsd install and installed all the ports that I wanted. Then I ran cvsup to upgrade the ports. When I tried to configure X with Xorg -configure that is when it pointed me to the UPDATING file . I made the xorg-upgrade script file but I am not quite sure how I can get it on the net as I am not quite good with command line tools.

[weziw]

By the way, after doing all that is when I ran the Xorg -configure command and the second to last line referred me to the log file in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and the last line states "Missing output drivers. Configuration failed"

[anomie]

I'd read the sections 'CAVEATS' and 'IF YOU RUN INTO PROBLEMS'. Those give clear instructions on extra troubleshooting steps, and how to get further help, respectively.

[weziw]

Thanks anomie, just out of curiosity are you running fbsd on an amd machine with an ati radeon or any other card from ati?

[anomie]

Hmm. Apparently I am using vesa driver for ATI Radeon on my desktop at work.

Section "Device"
...
Identifier  "Card0"
Driver      "vesa"
VendorName  "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName   "RV380 [Radeon X600 (PCIE)]"
BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"

No complaints.

[onlinebacon]

anomie, with xorg 7+ you could use the r300 drivers for your x600 card, this means you would get 3d acceleration and a faster desktop

Which is a plus

As for the xpress 200, I don't think they work well under open source drivers, hence won't work that well under freebsd because there's no ATI binary driver for freebsd, that supports the xpress 200, try using the VESA driver man.

[anomie]

anomie, with xorg 7+ you could use the r300 drivers for your x600 card, this means you would get 3d acceleration and a faster desktop

Thanks for the tip. I may give the r300 driver a trial run this week.