Making ATI 4890 work under Debian Lenny [RESEND - I forgot to credit StackOverflow answers]

[Omer Zak]

Few weeks ago I bought a new PC with a graphics card based upon ATI
4890.
Debian Lenny was installed on it and everything worked using an old 17"
display (1280x1024).

One day I replaced the old display by a new 23" display (1920x1080) and
then was dismayed to find that X-Window continued to work in the old
resolution.  I fooled around with /etc/X11/xorg.conf and tried various
tricks - of no avail.

The breakthrough came when I found from /var/log/Xorg.0.log that no ATI
driver was used, but the vanilla vesa driver.  The
xserver-xorg-video-radeon version which I had on lenny (1:6.9.0-1
+lenny4) did not recognize ATI 4890.

I found a patch in
http://www.phoronix.net/downloads/rv770-4850-4870-id.patch which added
to the driver support for ATI 4850 and ATI 4870.  The URL
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ati_4870_oss&num=1
provided me with an hint how to locate the PCI chip ID for ATI 4890.

However, I decided to see what do Debian Sid and Debian Squeeze have to
offer.  Turns out that they both offer version 1:6.12.3-1.

To backport the package (the StackOverflow answers in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/130894/how-to-build-a-debian-ubuntu-package-from-source were very helpful):
1. mkdir somesubdirectory
2. Do wget to the following three files to the subdirectory:
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/x/xserver-xorg-video-ati/xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.12.3-1.dsc
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/x/xserver-xorg-video-ati/xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.12.3.orig.tar.gz
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/x/xserver-xorg-video-ati/xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.12.3-1.diff.gz
3. tar zxvf xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.12.3.orig.tar.gz
   creating subdirectory xf86-video-ati-6.12.3
4. cd xf86-video-ati-6.12.3
5. Apply the diff file by means of:
   zcat ../xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.12.3-1.diff.gz | patch -p1
6. chmod +x debian/rules
7. Rebuild binary package fitting your environment using:
   dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc -d
   The -d flag is needed to override unsatisfied build dependencies or
   conflicts.  In my case, the build was successful.

After you built the backported package, you can use it as follows:

1. Now you can install the package by:
   dpkg -i ../xserver-xorg-video-radeon_6.12.3-1_amd64.deb
2. I found that I need to force the X-Server to use the backported
driver by means of the following section in xorg.conf:
  Section "Device"
          Identifier      "Default Screen"
          Driver          "radeon"
  EndSection

I hope the above information will be helpful also for other people.
                                            --- Omer

-- 
My Commodore 64 is suffering from slowness and insufficiency of memory;
and its display device is grievously short of pixels.  Can anyone help?
My own blog is at http://www.zak.co.il/tddpirate/

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