I’ve been having all kinds of video issues since I purchased my new hardware, the strangest is with the video card… Worst part is that I don’t have time to deal with this right now, I have a baby on the way (as in less than 15 days, and need everything working!).
Part of my new hardware purchase was an XFX Radeon 6850 cooler, quieter, lower power usage, and 20% performance increase, an upgrade from my XFX Radeon 4890 monster. I first installed windows 7 with my new hardware and had lots of problems. After I gave up on that, I moved to Linux (I used windows 7 first, because Ubuntu 11.10 was due out in 7 days and I did not feel like spending a week setting up my computer, just to upgrade it) and decided that I have always liked XFCE and LXDE as my default window manager in other linux distros and so I would give them a shot now. I downloaded the Beta 2 release of both versions of Ubuntu and tested them via the live CD. I decided on LXDE as my WM of choice and went with it. 13 or so days later I went to download LUbuntu.
Well, to start it was not available at 5am on the release day (eastern time, GMT -5), nor was it available at 11am. so I stopped checking and just decided to wait until later. about 7pm I decided to check again, and Ubuntu 11.10 was available, and after hunting repositories, and it took 5 or 6, I finally found LUbuntu 11.10 non-beta on one of them. I of course chose the torrent file, and while it was still a bit slow (I’ve seen downloads on my computer hit 1.84Mb/s and this even via torrent was crawling along at 287Kb/s) it was going along well enough. I also started Kubuntu at the same time as you never know, and I used KUbuntu for years before I switched from Windows.
The installation went fine, other than the fact that my network adapter was not working (I expected this from the live CD and was prepared with a driver from the chipset vendor. After installation I put the NIC driver on the system, still no internet… I did a lot of searching and spent several hours trying to get the internal adapter working, no dice (even found other users who had the same motherboard and were not having issues after downloading the driver…) finally I got tired of it, I have not had a completely working computer in almost 2 weeks, and work (personal work) was starting to back up to enormous quantities and you could no longer see the top of my desk! So, I grabbed an old 1GB NiC out of the closet in my box ‘o parts, and slapped it in the computer, rebooted, disabled the on-board NiC and boom everything worked. (just a note, I did have the exact same issues in Windows, except the MB CD has Win7 drivers, and they worked). I downloaded the new AMD Radeon drivers and they installed fine, had my two monitors running, even got VMWare workstation working with only 2-3 days worth of research and troubleshooting.
Now I was happily installing my applications and setting everything up, that is when I noticed the lack of GUI system settings applications. Sure there are plenty out there, but most wanted me to install Gnome2 or nearly all of KDE to get them working. All I wanted was:
- To be able to see in real time the CPU usage of all 6 cores at the same time, with or without a graph.
- To customize my power settings so the monitor stopped cutting off every 15 minutes (I set the default time out to 180, in case I am watching a movie, as not all players stop the screen saver).
- To be able to change alternatives without installing half of Gnome2.
- To have the settings I changed in AMDCCLE actually save! and to be able to use them!
- There were some other things, but I can’t think of them now, I’ll add them if/when I remember.
I know most of what I want can be done from the command line, and I was doing some of it from there, but some of the things I wanted to make changes to, without using a GUI app, I did not know where all the setting are located, as they are not always in the same directory. (try editing Grub settings if you don’t believe me, they are located in 4 different places!) and I always miss something… So I decided to install KDE over top of LUbuntu, that way I could use LXDE when I wanted to, but I already knew where the settings and plasmoids were that I needed to do the other things I wanted. Not to mention at this point I was going on 3 weeks without a working computer. (as of when I was writing this, it has been 25 days since my new hardware was ordered and I had 2 day shipping on that!). Installation went well, although it missed a few things from just running : sudo apt-get install kde-desktop but I was able to resolve those with a sudo apt-get -f install and all seemed good.
Then about 3 days later something happened. I was working on setting up an application, I cannot remember what, and I was watching a pre-recorded TV show at the same time. suddenly my screen froze, mouse worked, but no response from the Keyboard. Since then I have not had a working display, and that was 6 days ago. Nothing has worked, I’ve even reinstalled KUbuntu from the KUbunutu install disk. I still cannot get my video working, I get video from one screen, a little less than half the time, the rest of the time the desktop fails to load, or I get a blinking blue or flashing white display. I’ve done a LOT trying to get it working, in fact I have not spent less than 6 hours a day trying to get it working, for 6 days! I’ve tried reinstalling LUbuntu, KUbuntu (the installer keeps crashing during partitioning, so I’ve given up on that one), and when I started writing this I was installing Ubuntu, even though I am not a fan of Unity. I’ve even gone so far as to unplug one of my monitors, thinking having two was causing the issues (during every attempt to reinstall the AMD drivers in the last 3 days I have been getting a message “configuration has more monitor than detected” and this was after using the auto configure to setup the configuration…). I’ve followed the sticky display issues during upgrade post on the Ubuntu Forums, not much there of use after spending 4 days googling the issue already. Nothing seems to fix it, not even copying my old, “working” xorg.conf file. part of the problem is that Ubuntu no longer requires an xorg.conf file, part of the problem is that the AMDCCCLE only saves in the home folder of the user who ran it (if you run it with root privileges, which are needed to make changes, it saves it in Root’s home folder!), but Ubuntu uses the file (if it exists) from /etc/X11! no wonder nothing was working… (any settings changes did not take affect when I made them from the GUI, and if I closed the AMDCCLE and relaunched it, they were reset to the defaults; however using the command line worked fine… the first time.).
Right now, with a clean installation (several posters on the Ubuntu forums have reported this resolved their issues, and nothing else), I am giving it a go, I only have 1 monitor connected right now, and still have to get most of my applications working again, but at least I have a desktop running, internet access, video drivers installed, and it has not crashed yet. I have not completely ruled out a crappy (but quite expensive) motherboard. A bit upset, I spent more on the upgrades for my computer, than I spent on my computer (which I built from parts, like always, in my life I’ve only ever bought 1 pre-assembled computer, and that was because my wife wanted it. and it lasted 5 years without upgrades and cost more than twice what I spent building this one, before my new upgrades anyway), and when I bought it everything was top of the line (except the video card and it was not too far down the list) and it almost all worked right away, but i never had any problems like I do now.
So, back to trying to get things running again. I’ll comment on the current status later if all is well, else I’ll post more headaches.
I started having an issue with my computer maybe back in May, where anytime I powered my machine off I had to reconfigure my Bios settings, as my primary Bios had failed, after several months of this I guess I just got tired of dealing with it, so I sold my android tablet (yes I did! and no I didn’t own more than one…) and bought a new Gigabyte Ga-990FX`-UD3 motherboard, which right now I am not very happy with, but I’ll get to that later, a new MD PhenomII x6 1090T CPU, a new XFX AMD Radeon 6850 Video Card, and 3 new Seagate 1.5TB HDDs. I have to reimburse myself for the hard drives however, as they were not paid for by selling my tablet. Hopefully selling my old Video Card, Motherboard, and CPU will cover their costs.
I’ve had all kinds of interesting episodes while trying to get this new hardware to work over the last, almost, 3 weeks. the good = back on linux, bye bye Microsoft. The bad=bye bye Google cloud print (kind of), possibility of getting Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking to work (outside of a VM), possibility of getting my digital camera to work by just plugging it in the computer (for now). Here are a list of some of the issues I’ve run into, if they have lengthy resolutions, or attempted resolutions, I’ll link to another post (after I write it!) describing my efforts to get things working.
First up: Microsoft Windows 7 x64 Ultimate edition
- The only thing on the motherboard that works immediately after installation are the CPU, Ram, Keyboard, and Mouse.
- NIC, eSATA, on-board RAID, USB 3.0, none of it worked until after installing the drivers from the MB CD.
- The motherboard has 2 or 3 different RAID chipsets, at least one Marvell 88SE9172 and a Realtek (I think), each can be enabled separately as IDE/AHCI/RAID, I’ll check and get back to you on this one.
- One for the internal SATA ports 0-3.
- One for the internal SATA ports 4 and 5.
- Can only be enabled as RAID when ports 0-3 are also enabled as RAID.
- This seems a little bit backwards to me, as the only way to mirror your boot drive is to enable RAID on all ports… or lose ports 2&3 and mirror on 0&1, then not set RAID on 4&5 giving you only a mirror plus 2 drive slots on the MB. Else you are forced to RAID 0/1 on ports 0-3 and to use 4/5 for your boot mirror.
- One for the eSATA port
- When enabled and nothing is connected, it reports 2 available ports; however when the cable is connected I have gotten 3 drives (out of 4) in my external drive caddy to show up.
- I ran into one issue where I had a device not identified in Windows 7, even after installing the drivers from the CD. I checked on the CD again and it actually has an installer to put Driver Agent on your computer to scan for out of date drivers. well I ran it.
- It found the missing driver and also told me about 6 others were either out of date or had the wrong drivers installed. of the ones it wanted me to update, only one was free, the others were available after paying a $29.99 annual fee.
- The first link took me to the Gigabyte home page for the MB but did not list any driver that was not also included on the CD.
- The second link took me to a driver website download page for an Nvidia driver package!
- Well I gave it a shot, and sure enough it recognized the device and installed the driver, from an Nvidia driver package on my AMD chipset MB.
- Then I started getting BSODs on the RAID driver MV91xx.dll.
- After moving all my data around so I could setup a RAID5 5 drive array of 1.5TB drives, I had to undo it all and move data around to use them as normal disks, so I could disable the Marvell RAID in the BIOS (internal SATA ports 0-5) to prevent windows from loading the driver (which was the newest version from their website).
- This did indeed stop the BSOD for that DLL.
- Then the system started shutting itself off randomly after 4-45 minutes from windows bootup.
- I have not yet figured this one out, Gigabyte support wants me to disconnect all USB devices to test… (no mention of how I am to connect my KB or mouse) fyi no issues with the USB devices when my old MB was in the case, and no issue with the USB devices when booted to a linux live CD, nor any issues with random power offs at all, now that I am booting to Ubuntu 11.10 x64.
- If you press a key (such as ctrl+f or del or F4 or F8 or Shift or anything else really) at anytime during bootup that the system is not expecting a keypress, the boot up process hangs and you have to press the reset button or manually power off the computer.
- What this means is if you are trying to get into the RAID BIOS controller setup, or the “change boot device” menu, or to get the GRUB menu to show up when hidden, or to start windows in safe mode, and you do not press the key/key combination one time at the exact time necessary, the system will hang and you cannot get in to that boot submenu
- It often takes me 10-30 boot attempts to get into what ever submenu I need to change the configuration.
- Ubuntu runs fine on the system, except for two issues…
- The network adapter will not work. I’ve tried many suggestions from forums, even downloaded the Realtek 8111e driver direct from realtek. It will not connect to anything (you may need to blacklist the wrong drivers, there are some 8 different models included in the linux driver package download).
- Current resolution, I installed a GB NIC PCI card, works great.
- I cannot get my Radeon HD6850 working, multiple issues.
- Any changes to the AMDCCLE configuration disappears after closing the interface. even if I open it right back up, the settings are back the way they were. Help with manually configuring AMDCCCLE
- Any time I restart the computer it hangs after “checking battery state [ok]“.
- This is when it loads the graphical settings to launch X.
- As a note, I have a dual monitor setup, both on the two DVI ports; however because one DVI port is a DVI-d I have to have my right monitor connected as monitor0 and my left one connected as monitor1 (this makes things backwards, moving the mouse to the right puts it on the left screen and vice versa, unless you specify it in the configuration.
- Current resolution for this problem (short incomplete version):
- Reboot into Ubuntu recovery mode from GRUB (good luck!).
- Mount/remount all devices and read/write.
- Then press enter to exit that screen.
- Then select root command prompt.
- Because the onboard NIC does not work, there is no point in selecting root command prompt with networking, as it won’t enable the PCI NIC.
- Now enter the following to remove all AMD video drivers from the system:
- learn more about the xorg.conf settings
- Hopefully you have manually created the deb packages for your ati drivers, if not, you can reboot now and use the default drivers for xorg to download the drivers and put them in the /root/amd6xxx directory on your system (you will need to create the amd6xxx directory under /root) and follow these instructions after booting back in to the recovery mode root command prompt after remounting devices as read/write, instructions above.
- You either already had the files, or you just created them (only follow the creating .deb files section), so we can move on to install the AMD drivers for the Radeon 6xxx series card.
- This should run without much of an issue, might be a couple of mini errors (file not found, skipping), but nothing to prevent the installation from finishing.
- And to finish up:
- I am not 100% sure the “effective=startup” part is necessary or even works.
- You can now reboot and cross your fingers.
- I have to do this every time I restart my system, and sometimes it does not work and I have to do it 2-5 times before I can get back in.
- There are also times when I boot and get 1 flickering screen and one working screen (both tinted like my background image).
- There are also times when I get one flickering screen and the other not, but both are nearly all white. Pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL initiates a reboot, so I know Ubuntu booted at least.
- There are some times when I get cloned displays in 1024×768 resolution (not my default or preferred).
Next up: Ubuntu 11.10 x64
apt-get purge -qq --no-download fglrx* xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon
rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf*
Xorg -configure
sudo /root/amd6xxx
./ati-driver-installer-11-9-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/oneiric
dpkg -i *.deb
aticonfig --initial=dual-head --screen-layout=right --xinerama=on --effective=startup --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf
Any attempt at a total and complete resolution is still a work in progress…
(missed this post somehow, been in draft for a while…)
well, I am still not getting any formatting on my blog posts, still have no idea what is causing it, but I am severely PO’d about it. I’ll start posting again and just pretend it’s a non-issue for now… I have been working on some of my PC issues and resolved a couple, I found that IF I set my SPU to specifics in the BIOS they are forced on the system after boot (auto-disables AMD’s Cool ‘n Quiet features) so this is not good. Next I learned that if I up my voltage on the NB to 1.25V I can run my on-board GPU at the card’s default standard speed of 700MHz (by default my MB was setting it to 497MHz, or 500MHz equivalent based on multipliers), so that is really good news, upped my windows 7 performance score by .2 (just a shame I do not run Win7 by default, which leads me to my next point…) If I want to overclock my CPU any, I have to do it from within the OS so as to keep AMD CnQ enabled, well… AMD OverDrive is a Windows exclusive app, so I will have to search for a way to do it in Linux without the 1st party app. I have also semi-resolved my random power offs (due to “overheating”) by disabling my ACPI system auto-shutdown feature, I now keep a temp monitor open on my desktop at all times (looking for a linux/KDE plasmoid that will display individual core temps, the default KDE plasmoid for system temp only shows the temp sensor that is on the cooling fan “on top of” the heatsink for the CPU. AMD OD shows the internal individual core temps… but my system is not going over 57C even after I overclocked it 800MHz to 3.997GHz (but I dropped it back to 3.795GHZ to be safe since my auto-shutdown is disabled). I was also able to boost my Hyper-Transport from 200MHz to 220MHz with no issues while playing DDO for 2.5 hours, but later while surfing the internet my PC crashed… So I dropped it down to 205MHz and it is stable (again only when booted into Win7) and have had no further issues, sitting pretty at 38C-47C per core. I have been using KUbuntu 10.04 for software and hardware compatibility issues while I wait for Fedora 13 to launch next week, so you may notice several Ubuntu 10.04 based posts here for a bit. I will try and post my experiences setting up KUbuntu some time this week, I took notes, but did not write it up yet.
about 5 minutes ago I took the time to write up (yet another) comment post on ZdNet’s blog site, about this technology, formerly known as lightpeak. I just wanted to drop a copy on my site here, maybe expand upon it a bit, and link back to the blog post on ZdNet.
take a quick look at those two links above and you’ll get a good understanding of what this technology is.
I think that Thunderbolt will be best used to support Quad full high definition displays for home theater and AMD’s Eyefinity technology, other than that the only thing it will be useful for is if someone release a “docking station” that connects to a Thunderbolt port and has 10 or 20 other ports on it so you can connect all your devices into this “hub” and run one cable to your laptop or desktop or tablet or smartphone, providing all of the devices connectivity, multiple external drives, multiple monitors, the mouse and KB, data cables for smartphones, media players, camcorders, and digital cameras, your speaker system, and so on…
Every single device would plug into 1 hub that would run 1-3 bi-directional (as thunderbolt appears to be limited to 7 max devices per channel OR 2 display devices), dual channel cable back to your laptop/desktop computer, if they were smart they would have 2-8 output sets and a built in Android OS system with a 4″ LCD screen that allows you to configure each device and direct which output “set” (where set= the 1-3 thunderbolt cables running to each computer) each device would be connected to, while also acting like an ethernet switch providing LAN connectivity and access to a cable modem (connected via ethernet or USB).
That is what Thunderbolt should be used as. You buy a laptop or desktop computer and it has 2 places to plug cables in, the power cable and it’s Thunderbolt cable so you can hook it up to “the hub” forget about changing the billions of devices out there to use the “new” technology, just provide a hub that allows all connection types to plug in and connect.
I would guess the Android “hub” would sell for $50 – $150 separately or be included with your new system purchase. Then when you get home the hub could sit on or under your desk and you’d plug everything into it, then use the touch display to configure the connections. It’s possible the “hub” could be running on a 4 or 6 core Tegra 3 SoC with an 8GB or 16GB SSD drive in it that runs as a small server that acts as a firewall for your network, manages your DHCP, automates your backups to the external drive connected to it, stream your media to your TV. basically the ultimate HTCP while also acting as your peripheral device hub.
But we will probably never see anything like that. It is sad that such a device would be possible within the next 12-18 months, but it will never be made.
- New blog post... Diablo III closed Beta http://t.co/dKC2ChWm
- New blog post... resolving video problems with K-L-Ubuntu and XFX Radeon 6850 http://t.co/H6bXuMqi
- New blog post... Computer upgrades http://t.co/6PWVNy4m
- $7 for $15 Worth of Hand-Tossed Pizza, Calzones, and Drinks at Andolini's Pizza Charleston, SC http://t.co/QnKwPwB
- New blog post... is zdnet.com/news down http://t.co/DThuI4r
- New blog post... Netflix Down? http://bit.ly/q74Svu
