[wellylug] Ubuntu 7.10 Ati help - Acer Aspire 5020 / Mobility Radeon X700

Wayne Koorts wayne at wkoorts.com
Sat Oct 20 11:44:10 NZDT 2007


Hi all,

I'm having some problems with the final release of Gutsy Gibbon relating 
to my graphics card.  Explanation below that I've already put to the 
Ubuntu forums but have not had any response.  Any suggestions will be 
greatly appreciated - I really want to make the effort to get Gutsy onto 
my main laptop.

I'm having issues with my Acer Aspire 5020 (model 5024WLMi) both with 
booting the LiveCD and after installing. When I boot the LiveCD (this is 
the 32-bit standard desktop CD) in normal graphics mode my screen goes 
blank when it's supposed to be starting X. It's as if the screen is 
actually turning off because the backlighting seems to be off.

I didn't have much hope with that since even 6.06 LTS doesn't work for 
this laptop in that mode, however LTS worked a treat with safe graphics 
mode... not so with Gutsy...

So the next thing I tried was using safe graphics mode. This one shows 
me a bit more info - it kind of flashes once (to blank) then reverts to 
the command line where it has things listed like Starting GDM etc. and 
then periodically flashes to blank screen and back every 3 seconds or so.

After that I did some searching around the net and specifically the 
Ubuntu forums and it seems some people have got theirs up and running 
(although few seem to have it as bad as my system) and I have tried 
roughly the following combination of workarounds, all of which have 
fixed similar issues with Ati for somebody but none of which works for me:

- Removed quiet and splash from boot options and added:
-- noapic irqpoll noirqdebug
-- noapic acpi=noirq nolapic
I even tried the above two combos without removing quiet and splash, 
have also tried nosplash.

Further googling resulted in me finding the release notes for Gutsy and 
it seems the Ubuntu folks have acknowledged some issues with Ati but I 
think that mine are more serious than just a "blank screen". For what 
it's worth they suggested adding the following to the Device section of 
Xorg.conf:

Option "LVDSBiosNativeMode" "false"

I did this (with the detected "ati" driver in use) and it made no 
difference. I also tried changing the driver to "radeon" because a "man 
radeon" was the only man page that suggested this option was available. 
No go.

I also tried the old break=bottom option and then modifying xorg.conf to 
use vesa (works on Fiesty for me IIRC although it's been a few months) 
but this time round nano doesn't load because it can't find the ncurses 
library.

Next thing was on to the Alternate iso. Downloaded that and did a 
text-based install which worked fine.  Now I just have the same problems 
described above but it loads faster because of no CD loading times Tried 
the same fixes on the installed system with the same results.

I did modify xorg.conf to give me vesa and that did the flashing screen 
thing again (I'm guessing that safe mode graphics uses vesa anyway). I 
had a quick look at the Xorg.log.0 (?) file in /var/log and it seems to 
be complaining about the horizontal refresh rate or something and then 
it goes on to say that it can't find a usable screen mode. If anyone 
would like specific parts of the Xorg log file I will do my best to get 
it in here but I really don't know what I'm looking for in there or if 
that is even the problem.

Any ideas?

Regards,
Wayne




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