[ncnmra]

OK, admittedly, I'm a total noob here. I used to use Linux frequently about 10 years ago, but its all been forgotten.

I've had a hell of a time getting any of the Live versions to work on any of my systems, so I gave up. I'm now trying the 9.04 Live version with better luck, but still no go.

Originally, I was getting NO video. Now, it seems that the live CD will boot, but my screen goes wonky, and my sound goes ballistic (starts making screeching sounds, like mic feedback or something).

I think the video issues are driver related. I have a laptop with an Radeon Mobility X1600. Windows works fine with the latest drivers.

I can boot into the ATI/AMD safe mode OK. When I do a "lspci | grep VGA" it comes back with:

Code:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M56P [Radeon Mobility X1600]

When I to run aticonfig, I get

Code:

aticonfig: No supported adapters detected.

Is there any way to get XBMC Live working under this scenario?

[odinb]

Do not know about XBMC with that graphics adapter, but I do know that the Xorg in 9.04 is too new for that card running with proprietary drivers.
ATI has dropped support for it, and proprietary drivers will only work with the Xorg in 8.10 or older.

Have that card in my machine at the office, and it is a pain running it on the open source drivers. I run a dual head setup with 2 HP LP2065 monitors, and I have all sorts of issues, like occasional screen flickers (DVI related I think since it does not occur on the monitor connected using VGA, and yes, I have swapped them around, the flicker follows the DVI connector), vertical grid lines where the mouse pointer gets fuzzy, and lots of other stuff. When the DVI-related screen flicker gets bad enough, I have to reboot, and then it might or might not flicker for a while...

Have been in contact with ATI/AMD, and they were very arrogant, referring to the drivers being HPs responsibility, basically passing the buck instead of taking responsibility for their drivers not being updated for Xorg for this less than 3 year old Laptop/GPU.
Guess if I am buying a new ATI/AMD product anytime soon with this piss-poor support? Guess not!

Xorg issue:
http://tech.shantanugoel.com/2009/05/04/...oblem.html
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3942

Enough of a rant, back to your issue.

In your case I would try installing 8.10 on that machine with the proprietary drivers, and then retry XBMC, or see if you can get hold of an 8.10 live CD....

Good luck!

[ncnmra]

What a giant PITA. What gets me is that the Mobility series is essentially identical to the regular series with different PCI IDs (I think). I get that impression because you can install the regular Catalyst drivers in Windows using the "Mobility Modder" hack (I suspect all it does is change the PCI IDs in the .inf files to match the Mobility card.

Oh well, I've got the Windows XBMC working well enough that I don't think I'll bother with the LIVE install. I might get a Revo in which case I'll re-investigate the issue of the LIVE install.

[odinb]

You are probably right on your thoughts there in regards to the HW vs SW drivers for ATI.

My feeling with this poor support for ATI drivers is with AMD. When ATI was purchased by AMD, AMD forced ATI to release the specs. for the Open Source community to be able to write their own drivers, since ATI has historically been really poor on Open Source drivers. My thought here is that this way they probably think they will get the drivers for free from the community.

I think this is a cheapskate strategy from ATI/AMD, and it will not encourage me to purchase ATI or AMD products again in the future if I can avoid it.

[iphunk]

^^^ Especially now that nVidia supports VDPAU under linix