Comment 28 for bug 254908

Hi all,
I recently bought a new Asus F6V, with Intel Core Duo P7350, 3GB RAM, and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470.

I installed Debian Etch using the installation CD etch-custom-0622.iso from here

http://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/

since the official installation CDs from Debian are missing some drivers for SATA drives. Anyway, this is just to say that after installing I got X correctly running with my hardware configuration using VESA drivers, at max resolution of 1024x768.
I tell you the installation CD version since I didn't check which versions have been installed of the relevant packages...

Then I upgraded to Lenny from the Debian official repository and this broken X (or the drivers): I was not able to get into graphical mode. Using VESA I got messages saying that it was not possible to correctly start X.
Then I downloaded the Radeon drivers from Debian repository, and changed xorg.conf to use them. In this case the system was simply stopping while entering the graph mode (consoles was always available).

After an half a day of searching and trying to tweak xorg.conf, I tried the instructions here

http://wiki.ubuntu-it.org/Hardware/Video/Ati/RadeonHd

to compile the latest Radeon's drivers from sources, and now everything works fine, even at resolution of 1280x800, which is the max I can obtain. (actually I didn't check every feature yet, like HDMI, second monitor, etc., but at least I have graphics :-))

btw, looking at section 8, "Known Bugs & Limitations", from here

http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd

I also tried the tweak of booting the kernel with mem=1000M (they suggest < 2GB), but before compiling the latest driver this didn't solve the problem. I currently using mem=1000M with the new drivers and everything work fine (not yet tested without this flag).

Hope this report of my experience could help somebody.
If someone is interested on the xorg.conf file I can attach it as soon as I will be using the laptop (I'm not using it right now).

Cheers,
/toOl