[arch-general] Mayday - Installed Fresh Archlinux on Laptop - Resolution stuck 1152x864, need 1440x900?? [SOLVED]

[David C. Rankin]

On Tuesday 03 November 2009 23:31:20 David C. Rankin wrote:
> The problem I have is that my laptop is stuck in 1152x864 resolution. For the text install that is fantastic, but when you start kde -- not so good. (should be 1440x900) The card is an RS690M (radeon 1200) and the radeon driver was loaded by default. The modules configured are:
> 

Well,

It's done and working well. There were a couple of layers missed items to get the proper resolution. First, despite the radeon driver being shown as loaded with lsmod, the xf86-video-ati package wasn't installed so the driver for the graphics wasn't present causing X/kdm t default to framebuffer which has 1152x864 and 1400x1050, but not 1440x900. Installing the ati package allowed me to set up the early start configuration KMS with the radeon driver. Booting immediately placed me in a vt1 which was beautifully sized for my laptop display (I'm still not sure the exact text resolution, but it looks damn good -- I'll check the next time I'm there)

A  negative side effect of the new console resolution is that vi will NOT run. It errors out on start complaining about the text mode size being too big. Vim and mc handle the resolution without any problem.

In both kde and e16, the display does OK. (Not good speed wise, but damn good for normal operation) It is a big improvement over the normal kernel module/xorg.conf setup because now desktop effects work OK. There are still some effects that just flat do NOT work for any radeon card I have tried (exploding windows, cylinder rotate and sphere rotate to name a few. When you attempt to activate exploding windows, "The following effects could not be activated, Explosion". With the cylinder and sphere, you get no feedback at all, they just don't work. (work fine on all my Nvidia boxes)

Oh, well. We are up. Thank you all for your great suggestions. I've got two more radeon projects/issues. One, tweaking the setting to see if I can get some additional performance out of the card (performance sucks with the ati and radeonhd drivers - 1065 FPS with the fglrx driver, 168 FPS with radeonhd, and 160 with ATI). Second, I get to play a bit more with git/bisect to find out where the radeonhd driver died for my laptop. I'll let you know if anything good comes from either.