Problems w/Radeon 7000VE (& possible solutions)

Knoppix is great! I'm using it as a way to reacquaint myself with the linux world. My experience to date has only been on PPC hardware, so the x86 world is a little new to me.

The problem I've been having is that while booting from the CD, the screen blanks out & loses monitor synch during the boot process &/or after X11 starts up.

Hardware includes: Asus P4B533-VM, P4 1.8 (Northwood), 512MB RAM & most importantly, a Radeon 7000VE.

All my hardware seems to be detected normally. The graphics card is noted as an "ati|radeon QY, using xfree86(vesa) server"

Here's what been tried:

• straight boot (eg. "knoppix")
  knoppix xserver=XF86_SVGA
  knoppix screen=1024x768 xmodule=radeon
  fb1024x768

All of the above showed no boot progress, no X11 console, & all other virtual consoles tried to synch the monitor, but failed.

Next:

• failsafe
  knoppix-txt
  knoppix vga=normal
  knoppix vga=normal xserver=XF86_SVGA

All of these resulted in a visible boot sequence @ 800x600 (although tux didn't show up), however x11 failed. The other consoles worked @ 800x600. Progress was being made...

Next:

• knoppix screen=800x600
  knoppix screen=800x600 xmodule=radeon

Again, with these I ahd no display at all as the boot happened, however x11 started up. Oddly the other consoles lost monitor synch when I switched to them. At least I had an XWindow system going with these...

Finally:

Code:

---

knoppix vga=normal screen=800x600

---

This showed the boot sequence (without tux) @ 800x600, fired up X11, and also had working virtual consoles!

Code:

---

fb800x600

---

This showed the boot sequence (with tux!) @ 1024x768, fired up X11, and also had working virtual consoles! I finally found a working cheatcode!! So I had to try one more thing...

Code:

---

fb800x600 xmodule=radeon

---

Again, the boot sequence showed (with tux) @ 1024x768, but X11 failed. Drat.

So can anyone interpret these results for me? I'm likely to try to create a fully disk-based linux solution & I'd like to sort out what is happening with the video drivers, framebuffers, etc.

Thanks,
Brad

P.S. Thank goodness knoppix boots fast!

Following up on my own post:

I've tried the above stuff with the 3.3 2-9-2004 release and it all behaves the same.

However, like a fool I realized that the problem is that I was running both the VGA out and the TV out at the same time. Disconnecting the TV out helped immensely.

With only VGA hooked up, the default "knoppix" login worked great.

With both hooked up, the default login only showed on the TV out--like the Xserver gave preference to that output.

With both hooked up, the "fb800x600" login gave me a mirrored display.

Hopefully someone will find this interesting.

Is it possible to make the VGA output the default display when logging in in a default manner?

Brad