Debian: Reconfiguring X to new video card

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 01:30:47AM -0500, Paul King wrote:
> Just wondered what suggestions people have for reconfiguring X under Debian 3.
> 
> I used to have an ATI Radeon AGP with 64 megs of RAM. X worked fine.
> 
> I now had to replace the card with an ATI Radeon 9200 AGP card with 128 megs of 
> video RAM. X crashes, and doesn't know what to do with my card.
> 
> I recall that there is on most Linux distros a fail-safe, graphical way to 
> configure X. It uses a minimal 16-color X server and what appears to be a 
> graphical interface to select your card, monitor resolution and whatnot. I 
> thought the command for this was XF86Config or XF86Setup. I've tried both 
> commands, and there is no executable with those names. xf86config gets me a 
> pure text interface; and xf86cfg tries to give me a graphical interface, but 
> crashes.
> 
> I use X11R6 version 4, and prefer to do without framebuffering.

The Debian Way to configure X is to do this:

dpkg-reconfigure -p low xserver-xfree86

And in case it doesn't auto update the XF86Config file, run 'dexconf' to
force it to rewrite it from the debconf data.

Now it is quite likely that version 4.1 simply doesn't support something
as new as a 9200.

After checking the XFree86 release notes, I see that 4.2 added the 7500
and 8500, and 4.3 added the 9x00 cards.  So there is simply no way it
can run the radeon unless you check www.apt-get.org and get a backport
of the 4.3 X packages.  It's not reasonable to expect new hardware to
work on a 2 year old release after all. :)

Lennart Sorensen
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