[CentOS] A last, desperate hope - video modes

Thu Oct 24 15:17:14 UTC 2013
Patrick Lists <centos-list at puzzled.xs4all.nl>

On 10/24/2013 04:42 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Hi, folks. This is, in fact, off-topic: I'm fighting a user's FC19 box. I
> updated him, rebooted... and his ATI video card seems to not be supported
> any more (and it's *not* that old - an RV620).

Google says it's from 2007 which make it ancient in Internet years :)
Afaict it's a FirePro / Radeon HD 3000 series and one solution is to use 
the proprietary Catalyst *Legacy* driver (< 13.1). The good folks over 
at elrepo.org have created kmod-fglrx-legacy for these old cards. I 
don't know if that's EL6 only or that they have one for F19 too. 
Alternatively check rpmfusion.org.

Looking at the output of modinfo radeon the RV620 is mentioned. That 
suggests that it should work with the radeon.ko kernel driver. Is the 
PCI address of your card listed in the output of modinfo radeon? You can 
find it with 'lspci'.

> The thing that drives me crazy is, when I reinstalled the whole system,
> whatever video driver the installer used for graphical install *worked*.
> So: does anyone have any idea a) what driver that uses, and b) how to
> force grub2 to use it (or do I also need to do this to the initrd)?

Maybe it was using the vesa video driver. Iirc you can force that by 
booting the kernel with 'xdriver=vesa'. Or you could try 'xdriver=radeon'.

For more info see:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/19/html/Installation_Guide/ch10s02.html#idm43623936

If the vesa driver works fine, if necessary, you could create an 
xorg.conf which uses the vesa driver. Maybe you also need to blacklist 
the radeon kernel module if that gets in the way.

Regards,
Patrick