Xfree86 ati driver and ATI Rage XL - X

All,

I've been having some trouble getting an ATI Rage XL PCI 8mb to work with
Xfree86. My first efforts were with the Xfree86 installtion that comes
stock with Debian 3.0r1 (Woody). I couldn't get the card to work at all,
so I downloaded and installed 4.4.0 . With that version, the system would
hang whenever I started X - the text screen would clear, the screen would
flash a few times, then nothing. At first I had modes up to 1280x1024 at
depth 24 in my XF86Config-4, but I cut it down to 640x480 depth 8 (only)
and I still couldn't get X started. I did run XFree86 -configure and
something worked - the screen flashed a few times, and I briefly saw a
good picture, then it flashed a few more times and hung. I was using
the "ati" driver. scanpci correctly identified the card as a Rage XL,
but incorrectly claimed it was an AGP card.

I found this post
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm....supernews.com
that suggested the Rage XL support broke at 4.2. So I downloaded 4.1.0
and tried that. It is more successful; I can start X and run the card
at up to 1280x1024 at depth 24. It's still not 100%, though. I can't
switch back to the text console once I've started X. Also, I can't get
out of X cleanly... trying to shut down X starts to work, then the system
hangs again. Trying to shut down the whole system from inside X also
starts to work, but when it's time to kill X, the system hangs and doesn't
complete the shutdown. This is still with the "ati" driver; scanpci
claims the card is an "ATI Mach64 GM".

Digging around in Google, it seems that others have had similar trouble
with the ATI Rage XL chip:
http://groups.google.com/groups?thre...0on-the-web.ch
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...andClement.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...mes.shef.ac.uk
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...0on-the-web.ch
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...washington.edu

I am posting to see if anyone else with a Rage XL has had trouble, or if
anyone has any suggestions. I plan to go next to the maintainer of the
ati driver, Marc Aurele La France, but I wanted to check here first.

Thanks!

Matt Roberds

In comp.os.linux.x mroberds@worldnet.att.net wrote:
>I've been having some trouble getting an ATI Rage XL PCI 8mb to work with
>Xfree86.

Just to finish the story... I never was successful in getting this card
to work well. I ended up switching to a 64 MB Radeon 7500 PCI card and
everything is fine. Hopefully this info will help someone.

Matt Roberds