MEPIS Community Forum

Among the updates Synaptic had for my M11-64 bit system yesterday (1/29/12) was : xserver-common (2:1.7.7-13) to 2:1.7.7-14, and xserver-xorg-core (2:1.7.7-13) to 2:1.7.7-14.

When I started up my machine today it appeared to hang with just a cursor on the screen by no shell prompt or Xwindows launch. After a lot of hair-pulling I figured out that if I delete the xorg.conf file it would boot into KDE but I've totally lost my desktop settings (resolution and dual monitor setup).

Thinking that I needed to update the ATI/AMD drivers, I ran sgfxi. But it now gets wget error trying to download the latest driver (12-11).

Everything was working fine until yesterday's update and I have no idea how to get things back to working.

I'm running a newer ATI/AMD card. I don't have th model number handy and kinfocenter can't identify it for me now. I know it's a RadeonHD. Not a top of the line card but fairly recent mid-level card.

For starters you might try the cheatcode 'xdrvr=radeon xconf' at the GRUB boot screen to see if you can get a GUI. Don't use the quotes.

EDIT: cheatcode misstyped, it should be xdrvr=radeon confx

The correct cheatcode is confx (instead of xconf) so use:

xdrvr=radeon confx

though that will probably give him the same as what he has right now with no xorg.conf file

Does your wireless/internet connection still work when not running in X? {some don't}

I use the radeon.modeset=0 cheat code normally. I'll try restoring the xorg.conf file and try that code instead.

I use a wired connection when I need to run sgfxi. It managed up self update the script so it seems that it's not a connection problem. Right now it looks like a problem with the AMD site. Bad timing.

I'm assuming you had been using the fglrx driver before things went belly up. If you originally used sgfxi to install the fglrx driver, the binary installer that was previously downloaded might still be in the /usr/src/sgfxi-downloads/ folder. If it is, you might try sgfxi's -W option which will skip the wget download(s).

Well the xdrvr=radeon confx got it to at least detect the right screen resolution. I was able to run sgxfi with the "-o 11-12" option to force it to load the earlier driver version. Good tip on the -w option though. I'll try that on the other machine when I get a chance.

Now everything is back the way it was. I still don't understand how it happened in the first place. And what is the difference with the two grub cheat codes for radeon?

That is -W not -w

Make sure it's an uppercase 'W'


edit: oops, Richb beat me to it.

Just to follow up:

sgfxi was trying to install the Radeon HD driver version 12-11. There must have been a problem with the ATI site as it was getting a 404 error. I was able to get "sgfxi -o 11-12" to work, which download the previous version. This machine has a Radeon HD 6770 installed.