[Maverick] X11 radeon fails badly with [Radeon Xpress 200M]

[Swâmi Petaramesh]

Binary package hint: xserver-xorg-video-radeon

System: Acer Aspire 3104 WLMi

Video board :

           *-display
                description: VGA compatible controller
                product: RS482 [Radeon Xpress 200M]
                vendor: ATI Technologies Inc
                physical id: 5
                bus info: pci@0000:01:05.0
                version: 00
                width: 32 bits
                clock: 66MHz
                capabilities: pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
                configuration: driver=radeon latency=66 mingnt=8
                resources: irq:17 memory:f8000000-fbffffff ioport:9000(size=256) memory:fc000000-fc00ffff memory:fc020000-fc03ffff

This board used to work *perfectly* in Ubuntu by the old times where the fglrx driver could manage it, but new fglrx doesn't support "old" ATI boards such as Xpress 200M anymore, so I have to use the "radeon" driver.

Since :

- Board badly suffers from bug #318325 (so suspend to RAM is impossible)

But more recently, since Maverick, new trouble appeared :

- In normal use, mouse cursor disappears and reappears only after shitfing back and forth to a text console. Trying « Option "SWcursor" » in xorg.conf completely corrupts display from the start.

- The use of KMail (very precisely) causes the display to blink / become irreversibly black / fail completely

- Trying "radeon.modeset=0" in /etc/default/grub causes X to segfault at startup.

The board now gives "usable" results only by using « Driver "fbdev" » which is highly suboptimal.

- fbdev gives no corruption, sometimes full screen blinks in fulscreen modes, still suspend is unusable (per bug #318325 )

So the more Ubuntu evolves, the less that video card - that once perfectly worked... - is usable.

[Swâmi Petaramesh (swami-petaramesh)]

Adding that using xorg-edgers ppa instead of "standard Maverick X11" doesn't help in any way...

[Wojciech Ryrych (ryrych)]

I also have problems with this card in Kubuntu 10.10. When deskop effects are turned on X crashes randomly. But sometimes when kWin effects are disabled I get graphical glitches especially using Firefox.

Also tried using X-updates and xorg-edgers. The same problems and crashes. Open driver is poor quality. :(

[bugbot (bugbot)]

Hey Swâmi,

Hi, have you had a chance to test if this bug is still present in natty?

If it does (and if you're the original reporter), please boot into natty
and run the command:

  apport-collect <bug-number>

which will update the bug with fresh logs and tag the bug as affecting
natty. (It is best to run this right after reproducing the problem.)

[Swâmi Petaramesh (swami-petaramesh)]

Some issues described in this bug report seems to be better now (although bug #318325 is still present).

Starting KMail doesn't cause immediate display failure anymore and there are no other "immediately visible" issues. However I haven't used this machine in Natty for long, so some issues may appear after some use (but that's an old computer I don't use much except as a backup machine theses days... so I may not notice...)

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Alright, well we'll close out the bug report for now. This report itemizes a number of issues, but we tend to prefer having separate bug reports for separate issues, so it's easier to track when they're fixed or still remain. Some of these aren't X bugs either, so would want separate reports filed against the software that causes them.