Monday, June 11, 2007

Singing the ATI 9100 IGP Blues

Well, I've got a second friend who has Ubuntu 7.04 on his laptop now. Everything was beautiful until he asked me to enable TV out. After hours of searching for a method, I found out that the 9100 and 9200 occupy a no man's land in driver country: The open drivers support them well, but don't do TV out, the new proprietary don't support the chipset anymore, the older proprietary drivers support it but only in limited 2D capacity -- no 3D and no TV out, and the patch to the Open Source drivers which someone created from the Gatos project is out of date and no longer builds. I worked for hours on getting the Gatos patch to work. Ugh!

I don't know what to tell my friend. I'm sure someone could get the Gatos patch updated, but my limited scripting skill don't transfer well to video driver programming in C. I think he may never get the TV out to work, in which case he'll be headed back to WinXP.

8 comments:

  1. Aaaah yes... I have the same problem over here, my HP ZV5000 comes with a ATI 9100 card and although the open source drivers support 3D acceleration, xinerama is not possible to use and the TV out is also unavailable...

    Guess it is time to install Windows XP again =o(. The sad thing is that this will likely not be fixed in the future as it is an "old" card.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is fixed in the new radeon driver. It only works in 800x600 for now.

    # turn the output on
    xrandr --output S-video --mode 800x600

    # Turn off
    xrandr --output S-video --off

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ditto what Daengbo said - I have the same laptop as xtracto (you know, with the horrible AC jack...).

    I updated /etc/X11/xorg.conf to use "radeon" rather than "ati" for the driver, and it works great.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm not having any luck getting s-video out to work with my ATI 9100 IGP on Hardy Heron. I'd be much obliged if someone could send me their xorg.conf

    ReplyDelete
  5. If you have Ubuntu7.10 or later, then there are no changes to xorg.conf to make. You only need to make sure that you are using the Radeon driver.

    In fact, there is no xorg.conf at all in Hardy (8.04), so you don' need to edit anything.

    For both of these, you just need to type in the commands in my comments above.

    If you have Ubuntu 7.04 or before, TV-out isn't supported and you're out of luck.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm running MythBuntu 8.04 which does still have an xorg.conf. By default, it does not contain much information anymore, but you can still customize it if you want to.

    I am using the radeon driver and I tried the xrandr commands, but the only thing that happens is that the colors on my vga output become brighter (higher gamma?). Nothing shows on my S-video output, while that works fine during startup and with the framebuffer or vesa. It's very frustrating since I can't seem to find any feedback/logs on what's going wrong.

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  7. I don't have the hardware to check this right now so I can't really troubleshoot it for you. You might want to post this on the Ubuntu Forums.

    Are you sure it's the 9100 IGP?

    ReplyDelete
  8. Yeah, I'm sure, it might be a different chipset then the ones used in laptops though. Anyhow I've given up on this and switched to using my PVR 350's TV out instead.

    See my post for more info: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=795533

    ReplyDelete

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