Video card problems on Fedora

[Polyphony]

Fedora for some weird reason isn't recognizing my ati video driver, so it defaults to the laggy weird vesa driver that I really don't like... at least that's what I think it's doing.  I have Gnome 3 and I go into settings->Details and the overview says this:


Memory:  3.3GiB
Processor:  AMD A6-4400M APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics x 2
Graphics:  VESA: DVST
OS type:  64-bit
Disk:  633.7 GB

I know I have a Radeon graphics card in my laptop, I don't know the exact model number or anything, but why is it using the VESA driver instead of the open source ATI driver?

[relax]

ati is using the fglrx drivers.
do a "lspci | grep VGA" on terminal to see what  grapic card you have
install ati drivers from ati's website
try forcing to load fglrx or radeon drivers from boot ill think it is radeon.modset=1 or video=fglrx
not sure doh check google.
you can also try loading drivers in xorg.conf, Driver=fglrx

just some thoughts

[spark]

but why is it using the VESA driver instead of the open source ATI driver?

Because Linux ships with a generic  VESA Xorg video driver for VESA-compatible video cards (Video Electronics Standards Association)
it is not possible to have driver support for every video card manufacturer  you have to pick the right driver and install it by yourself

[Polyphony]

lspci | grep VGA shows:

00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 9990

I've already tried installing the Catalyst driver but Fedora 17 seems to be using a version of Xorg that is incompatable with the closed source ATI card :/ (that's what I always used to do in ubunu and Linux Mint)

what I don't understand is that when I run sudo yum install xorg-x11-drv-ati.x86_64 it says it's already to the newest version and is installed, but it isn't the default driver

[Polyphony]

I generated an xorg.conf file by running Xorg :1 -configure and copying the xorg.conf.new to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and now Gnome says I'm using:

Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 0x300)

I don't know why fedora is being a dbag but I'm trying to find out how to force the ati driver by configuring the xorg.conf or something google is my friend

[spark]

Follow this HOWTO http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=155503
if it doesn't work, post errors output

[Polyphony]

thank you so much for the link spark! I'm currently downloading the dependencies and stuff (about 117MiB)

[Polyphony]

ugh, didn't work... it just gave me the infamous "OOPS!!! sorry, Gnome FUCKED IT UP AGAIN" error message... at least that's what I read thank you for the tutorial though, I think the proprietary driver just isn't compatable with my version of xorg :/

[spark]

Maybe you have an HD4xxx video card or below which is not supported in F17 as stated in the tutorial.

Anyway post output of : rpm -qa | egrep -i "kernel|catalyst"
just to check the installed packages.

[Polyphony]

Code: [Select]

kernel-3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64
kernel-headers-3.5.3-1.fc17.x86_64
kernel-devel-3.5.3-1.fc17.x86_64
libreport-plugin-kerneloops-2.0.13-2.fc17.x86_64
abrt-addon-kerneloops-2.0.12-1.fc17.x86_64
kernel-3.5.3-1.fc17.x86_64

as you wish lol

[spark]

no catalyst packages?  (egrep -i "kernel|catalyst")

otherwise consider downgrading to F16  , works like a charm for me

[Polyphony]

when I had the gnome error I just ran su and went into my command history on tty2 to remove instead of install I also tried installing fedora 16 but it didn't recognize my video card either and didn't even load the full gnome desktop, there was no transparency or anything :/