ARRGH: Help with Radeon 7000

[Adam J]

At first it wouldn't go into X, just init 3. So installed XFree86 4.2.0 (then upgraded to 4.2.1) and now I can get into X fine, but it looks horrible. It's very grainy and everything is huge.

When I run XFree86 -configure, this error is shown:
"(EE RADEON(0): [dri] RADEONInitVisualConfigs failed (depth 8 not supported). Disabling DRI. Couldn't load XKB Keymap, falling back to pre XKB keymap."

Any idea what this means in English, and how to fix my machine?

[bwkaz]

The first thing that comes to mind is to try to up your color depth, to at least 16-bit. In /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 (if it exists; if not, use /etc/X11/XF86Config), in the Screen section, try changing the DefaultDepth to either 16 or 24.

Oh, wait, maybe not. That error was when you were running XFree86 -configure, so it's not an error that you normally see. Never mind on that one then.

Run X normally again, and then post your /var/log/XFree86.0.log file.

[Adam J]

i tried everything i could think of, with no luck. then i thought, "hey, the first time the machine probed this vid card, i didn't have XFree 4.2.1 yet. let's see what happens if i put it back in my old machine, let it probe everything, let it configure everything. then shutdown, put it back in my new machine, and let it auto probe,"

well you know what? that worked. the resolution looks fine now. what a pain in the ***. don't get me wrong, i love linux, but its stuff like this why it will NEVER phase Miscro**** and will always be a computer geek-only OS.

[Molecule Man]

Obviously you have never gone through the pain of installing new hardware on windows.

A friend of mine just upgraded a Creative SB Live to an Audigy. This was on XP and he ended up formating the drive and reinstalling Windows. When the driver support is not native to the OS, it can be a bit tricky to get it installed right.