Help - please help...

[Paul Santa Maria]

Hi -

With all due respect, it *is* possible - I just haven't succeeded in doing it
yet.

Here's the "big picture" of what I've tried so far:

  1. The PC has three ATI 9200SE video adapters; all connected to PCI
     slots (no AGP).

     One adapter can be standard VGA.  The other two must be S-Video (the
     actual monitors can be up to 300 feet away from the PC.  VGA signals
     won't carry, S-Video can).

     I'm porting from a legacy DOS system to SuSE Linux 9.2.

  2. The built-in SuSE Radeon drivers were able to auto-detect the Radeon's
     and display to each (as displays unix:0.0, unix:0.1 and unix:0.1).

     So far, so good.  But it only worked with VGA output - not to S-Video.

  3. I then tried the fglrx drivers from ATI's web page.

     These were succeswsfully able to display to either VGA or S-Video ...
     but they crashed.  I believe the fglrx binaries are a dead-end: I do
     not believe they can be made to work.

  4. I then looked at Gatos (http://gatos.sourceforge.net) ati.2 and
     tv_out drivers.

     Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out any way to use the Gatos patches
     without rebuilding the entire Xorg X windows distribution.  And I've
     failed so far to do this.

  5. As I said, I'm porting from a legacy DOS application that works.  If
     I could build and run a viable radeon driver (*anybody's* Radeon
     driver), I could conceivably patch the driver myself (despite the
     fact that I know nothing about Xorg device drivers at this point - I'm
     definitely interested in learning!)

  6. I've also been through Eric S. Raymond's excellent "video timings 
     HOWTO", but I confess I still haven't figured out how to successfully
     define my own parameters.

  7. All things being equal, my next step is to revisit what went wrong
     with my last attempts to build Xorg 6.8.99.15.

Thank you again for your reponse .. PSM
     own 

--- Alex Deucher <alexdeucher at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7/25/05, Paul Santa Maria <paulsm1021 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Hi -
> > 
> > Apologies in advance if this isn't the correct forum, but I'm hopeful that
> one
> > of you can help point me in the right direction.
> > 
> > PROBLEM:
> > I'm trying to get S-Video output from ATI 9200SE video cards on SuSE Linux
> 9.2.
> > 
> > 
> > I've tried literally 1000s of different combinations (including trying to
> > install ATI's fglrx binaries - which only partially work, and trying to
> rebuild
> > several latest/greatest versions of Xorg 6.8.2).
> > 
> > CURRENT STATUS:
> > 1. I'm back to the standard Suse 9.2 distribution, including:
> >    rpm -qa|grep x11 =>
> > rpm -qa|grep x11
> > xorg-x11-Mesa-6.8.1-15.4
> > xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi-6.8.1-15.5
> > xorg-x11-driver-options-6.8.1-15.4
> > xorg-x11-6.8.1-15.4
> > ghostscript-x11-7.07.1rc1-207
> > xorg-x11-doc-6.8.1-15.4
> > xorg-x11-server-glx-6.8.1-15.4
> > xorg-x11-server-6.8.1-15.4
> > yast2-x11-2.10.8-2.1
> > xorg-x11-man-6.8.1-15.4
> > xorg-x11-devel-6.8.1-15.4
> > xorg-x11-Mesa-devel-6.8.1-15.4
> > xorg-x11-Xvnc-6.8.1-15
> > xorg-x11-libs-6.8.1-15.4
> > xorg-x11-fonts-scalable-6.8.1-15
> > heimdal-x11-0.6.2-8.1
> > 
> > 2. I'm running a single ATI 9200SE card in a PCI slot.
> >    I'm running S-Video output to a 27" Zenith CRT (older 
> >    glass-tube) monitor.
> >    It boots fine in text mode.
> >    I would expect the monitor to be {60Hz/15.734 KHz}.
> > 
> > 3. I generated my /etc/X11/XF86Config (on Suse 9.2, xorg.conf is
> >    a symbolic link to XF86Config) with this command:
> > 
> >    sax2 -a -r --lowres --vesa 640x480 at 60
> > 
> > 4. My full XF86Config and Xorg.0.log files are below.
> > 
> >    The picture is "scrambled": like my horizontal or vertical settings are
> >    way, way off.
> > 
> >    I'm sure the answer is something very, very simple .. maybe just
> >    changing    my "Modeline" parameter.
> > 
> > Any suggestions or advice would *definitely* be appreciated!
> > 
> > Thank you in advance .. PSM
> > 
> 
> The current xorg radeon driver does not support tv-out.  fglrx might.  
> 
> Alex