[GLLUG] dual head question

[Mike Rambo]

Marr wrote:
> 
> On Saturday 31 May 2003 07:43am, Mark Szidik/mlc wrote:
> 
> ---------------
> I have a Radeon 7000/VE that came with my new Dell PC.  It is dual head
> capable, so I thought I'd put that feature to work right away.  Well, I am
> close.  When I start X (running RH's bluecurve temporarily) both displays
> come up and look as I would expect them.  Monitor0 works perfectly When I try
> to move my mouse to monitor1 the screen goes blank and the monitor goes into
> powersaver mode.  So I know that the signal to the display drops, but why?  I
> suspect Xinerama, but when I remove it the same thing mappens.  Any ideas?
> 
> Thanks,
> -Mark
> ---------------
> 
> Hi Mark,
> 
> I don't see anything obviously amiss in your configuration.
> 
> My first guess would be to (temporarily) disable DPMS on the monitors, but it
> looks like you've already thought of that.
> 
> My next guess would be to start disabling things in the "Module" section like
> GLX, DRI, DBE, etc since I've read of problems with some of those things
> (can't remember which or any details) with multi-head, especially with
> accelerated multi-head.
> 
> Also, check into the options for the 'radeon' XF86 driver. A year or so ago, I
> had to add this line to the "Device" section for an old Hercules PCI card,
> using the 'tseng' XF86 driver, in a 3-headed configuration. Without this
> line, it just wouldn't work!
> 
>     Option "noaccel"      # when problems with accelerator
> 
> Also, looking back at a similar email thread from a year ago, I see that Mike
> Rambo had problems with a Radeon 7000 (PCI) in a dual-head setup. His
> (private) email to me after he got a passable working setup indicated that he
> "can't get color depth beyond 15 bit". It sounded as if the 'radeon' driver
> was rather immature at that time. His problem was distinctly different than
> yours, but maybe he can shed some light on this.
> 
> HTH some....
> 
> Bill Marr
> 

Yes, my problem was somewhat different. First of all, both of my radeon
7000's had only one head enabled on the card from ATI - they were more
cost effective (read cheap) versions of the cards. The dual head setup I
was messing with involved a second video card that was integrated on the
MOBO of one of the machines I was working with. Also, my problems were
with outright lockups of the box. It locked up totally! I had no choice
but to turn off power and restart.

Overall I've concluded the radeons aren't all they're cracked up to be -
they've given me fits on occasion even with That Other OS [tm} to say
nothing of Linux. I decided to buy them at the time because "they
supported Linux and the open source community" whereas nvidia was a
closed source binary driver. After getting my radeons, and judging from
comments from others on various lists, I've concluded that ati may
support open source in some way but when you get down to brass tacks
nvidia works... Whatever...

One thing you can try is to to disable DRI. Bill suggested that above.
Bill also mentioned that, at the time, I found that the driver wouldn't
support greater than 15 bit color. That was a couple of years ago though
(on Mandrake 8.2 initially and I did find that Mandrake 9.0 later
represented a small degree of improvement though still not very good) so
things might have changed significantly since then. YMMV. I was never
able to get a good frame rate with either the PCI or AGP radeon 7000 and
still have a stable platform. Basically, disable 3d and acceleration,
get the color density reduced enough, and you can get a useable degree
of stability. My experience was that you can't expect much more. As I
said, this was some time ago. You can always hope that the drivers have
improved since then. You can probably tell I'm not much of a fan of
radeon cards...


-- 
Mike Rambo
mrambo at lsd.k12.mi.us