ATI's All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro Driver

[mzehn]

I spent most of the day getting RedHat 8 setup on my new computer, and this is the first time I've ever used Linux. I like it a lot, and managed to get lots of things working, but when I installed the driver for my All-In-Wonder Radeon 9700 Pro provided on ATI's website (http://mirror.ati.com/support/drivers/linux/radeon-linux.html?cboOS=LinuxXFree86&cboProducts=AIW+9700+PRO&eula=&choice=agree&cmdNext=Next) and rebooted, I got a blue screen (are they copying off Gates?) with two pink text-based selection boxes. The text inside them wasn't legible (it looked like a random assortment of characters), so I don't know what each option offered me, but I picked one, and it landed me out in a text-based login prompt. I tried rebooting and picking the other, but got the same result.

Can I "revert" to a configuration that existed before I installed the driver from ATI? Also, has anyone else experienced similar problems with their drivers?

Thanks!

[mdwatts]

Did you backup your original X config before installing and configuring the ATI drivers.

/etc/X11/XF86Config or -4

Post the directory contents of /etc/X11 if you need assistance.

ls -al /etc/X11

[mzehn]

I'm writing this on my Windows machine, so I had to copy the X11 directory onto a flash memory card (USB Mass Storage) and open it in Windows. Because the card had an msdos filesystem, it must have truncated some of the extensions. It also didn't seem to copy everything, so this may be an abbreviated list, but here are the contents I could get:

/APPLINK/
/DESKTOP-/
/FS/
/GDM/
/LBXPROXY/
/PROXYMNG/
/RSTART/
/SERVERCO/
/STARTHER/
/SYSCONFI/
/TWM/
/XDM/
/XINIT/
/XSERVER/
/XSM/

XF86CONF.BAC
PREFDM
XMODMAP
XRESOURC
XF86CONF.OLD
XFTCONFI.REA

I'm guessing I'll have to take a look at either XF86CONF.BAC OR XF86CONF.OLD and replace some things in another file with things found in one of those, but I don't know what other file that might be.

Thanks for the help, and thanks for putting up with a newbie!

P.S. If there is a way to copy the results of a command line directory listing to a file, I could copy that file to the flash card and transfer it here to my windows machine so I could post it here, but I'm just not sure if such a possibility exists.

[mdwatts]

Have a look at the date/time stamp for both of those files to see if one was created just before you started to install the ATI drivers.

If so, you would then be able to rename the file to XF86Config-4.

cd /etc/X11

cp <filename> XF86Config-4

Pipe the output of 'ls' to a file.

ls -al /etc/X11 > ls.list (or whatever filename you choose)

[mzehn]

Thanks - that seemed to work! Now I've just got to figure out the right way to install the drivers... but at least now I know how to fix things if they get messed up again.

Thanks again!

[mdwatts]

Glad to help and that you were able to revert back to the original working version.

Sorry I can't help with the ATI driver installation as I don't have a ATI card right now.

You could try searching the LNO forums to see if others have posted instructions on installing the drivers.

Besides the ATI driver site instructions, try searching Google for Linux ( www.google.com/linux ) for i.e. the ATI video card model and 'install' or 'install drivers'.

'ATI 9700 install driver'