I wrote and now I'm answering my own post:
nate" centos@linuxpowered.net wrote:
David G. Miller wrote:
> > Section "Device" > Identifier "Videocard0" > Driver "vesa" > EndSection
[..]
> and the video card is (this is a single card that shows up twice in lspci): > > 04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV516 [Radeon > X1300/X1550 Series] (prog-if 00 [VGA])
any particular reason why your using the vesa driver on what seems to be a fairly recent ATI card instead of the ATI specific drivers? Perhaps the vesa driver doesn't work as well with power management(never used it myself for very long).
I'd try the ATI drivers and see if it fixes the behavior, you'll probably get much better performance at the same time, with perhaps a bit less stability depending on what you do.
nate
It's what the install configurator came up with and the ati driver doesn't work with this video card (output from startx):
... (WW) RADEON: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:4:0:1) found (WW) R128: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:4:0:1) found (EE) No devices detected.
Fatal server error: no screens found XIO: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0" after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
I like getting a new install stable and fully functional with open source drivers before introducing perturbations like using a proprietary display driver. That being said, I just installed the ATI proprietary driver. So far the system is stable. I'll see whether the monitor correctly goes to a low power mode tonight.
The ATI proprietary driver seems to have fixed the problem. The monitor was in power save mode when I checked it this morning.
The ATI Linux Driver wiki at http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux is very badly out of date. It has lots of dire warnings about things not working, work arounds required, etc. I pulled down the driver package from the ATI site, ran it to create a Red Hat rpm and installed the RPM. After I rebooted, everything just worked. I added some comments to the wiki to indicate that the problems described there only apply to RHEL/CentOS 5.0. Upgrading a 5.0 install to 5.1 or installing from 5.1 images and then installing the ATI proprietary driver is a piece of cake.
It would be nice if the open source "ati" display driver got extended to include more recent ATI video cards. I'm now running a "tainted" kernel since I have the proprietary fglrx kernel module. Unfortunately, as with how this thread got started, lots of functionality isn't there with the "vesa" display driver.
Cheers, Dave