problems with "ATI proprietary" R500 driver on xorg server 7.0.1

[Dan Engholm]

Roland Scheidegger wrote:
> On 25.09.2009 07:22, Dan Engholm wrote:
>   
>> Dear list,
>>
>> I have a PC with an ATI FireGL V3400 display adapter.  It has two flat
>> panel LCD monitors connected via DVI and I want to set it up with a
>> single desktop spanning the two.  After some research, I figured that I
>> had to install the ATI proprietary driver to get the Xinerama extension
>> for this card so I got it and installed it with no apparent problems. 
>> Unfortunately, aticonfig reports that it cannot find suitable hardware
>> so I had to configure the server by hand.  I found that it works just
>> fine with Clone on and Xinerama off but if I reverse the two, the server
>> crashes with this in the log:
>>
>> Backtrace:
>> 0: X(xf86SigHandler+0x71) [0x48e8f1]
>> 1: /lib64/libc.so.6 [0x3b2b6302d0]
>> 2: X(xf86RandR12CreateScreenResources+0x38e) [0x4b7c0e]
>> 3: X [0x4b1d3f]
>> 4: X(main+0x2e5) [0x4333b5]
>> 5: /lib64/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xf4) [0x3b2b61d994]
>> 6: X(FontFileCompleteXLFD+0x229) [0x4327f9]
>>
>> The driver says this of the adapter:
>> (--) R500(0): Chipset: "ATI FireGL V3400" (ChipID = 0x71d2)
>>
>> I could not find any driver version information in the log but I just
>> downloaded it from AMD on the 15th.  The installer's filename is
>> ati-driver-installer-9-9-x86.x86_64.run.
>>
>> If anybody has any ideas on how to get around this problem, I would
>> appreciate hearing them.  Other information is available upon request. 
>> Thanks in advance.
>>     
>
> if you insist on proprietary driver, r5xx and older are only supported
> in the legacy driver (9.3) not the current one.
>
> Roland
>   
Roland,

I don't insist.  In fact, I would prefer not using proprietary 
software.  When I started looking into this problem, I had trouble 
finding anything on the Web and what little I did find indicated that I 
needed to get the proprietary drivers from AMD.  I'm still no wiser 
about other options so if you have any pointers or information on other 
solutions, I would be happy to hear them.

--Dan