ATI X1900

[jchapman]

I was wondering if anyone is using PCBSD with X1900 or X---- card? I can't get X windows to load with my card. I've even tried using the vesa driver and can't get it to work. Do I need to download a driver to use it? If so what driver and how can I do it from the shell. I'm not real familiar with BSD shell programs. Is there anything like wget to download things? Also if I was to copy a driver to a flash drive how do I mount it? What does it show up as in /dev . I am a linux user so if someone can give me instructions with the linux equivalents I think i would know what I am doing. Thanks. I hope to get used to using BSD.

[TerryP]

FreeBSD uses the fetch command at it's most basic use it's run as "fetch ftp_or_http_URL" and wget can be installed via ports. Most general commands are simular but the -switches can be different from GNU - like how "ls" handles color.

I've only seen USB sticks detected as "da" devices. If you plug in the flash drive it will probably show up in /dev/ as da<usbPort#>s1 in mine is usually /dev/da0s1 and mounted on /mnt/devname.

other then the radeon and ati drivers in xorg6.9 I don't know of any ATI Drivers any closer to BSD then Mac OS. If the card can't at least handle the vesa I'd start wondering what they are building it with.

[jdarnold]

Yeah, I've gotten it to work, more or less satisfactorily, with my x850 card, dual monitors even. Search my blog for xorg.conf and get the ugly details.

[jchapman]

I was looking at some pci nvidia cards and I think I'm just going to buy one of those in the mean time to get the box running decent. I wish ati had decent linux or bsd drivers like nvidia. The funny thing is I can get OSX86 to pretty much run outta the box on my hardware and have such problems with video with BSD. Thanks for your help though. I think I'll take a look at your xorg.conf file and see if I can adapt it to my card and hopefully it will work, but I think I will just buy a nvidia pci card to use for *nix. I wish I wouldn't have put $500 into an ati card because I really don't care to run windows on anything anymore and would like to have xgl support in linux, and acceleration in BSD. Oh well hopefully it will be supported better in the future since amd bought ati. It is a good card though, just drivers and the OS (windblows) hold it back.

[TerryP]

When I checked for ATI on Google I got AMD which got me to ATI Drivers. I noticed fine version support for Windows, sveral Macintosh options + Linux drivers for what ever good they are I can't say. ^_^

The only ATI cards I've ever used are crap compared to my nVidias any way. Also the only one I have still in use is running PC-BSD while it steals 64MB of my RAM since it's not on e of the desktop models.

[jchapman]

I got my laptop running pcbsd. It uses a X300 ati graphics chipset (200m). It is also a pci-e chipset like my X1900, so hopefully with the final release with PCBSD (or freeBSD 6.2) my card will be supported. I think from now on I will be buying nvidia cards because of the support of the opensource community (linux, BSD), hopefully AMD will be more helpful but in the mean time. I'm switching to Nvidia. Has anyone heard of any broadcom 43xx drivers or development of drivers on BSD? I have another pcmia card for my laptop to use with BSD but i haven't gotten it working yet. It's an atheros card. I gotta say I do like PCBSD. It runs very well on my HP nx6125 laptop.

[TerryP]

I think broadcom bcm43xx or some thing like that chipset. Wifi works with FreeBSD via NDISGEN. My laptops got a "Single chip Broadcom BCM4318KFBG P11" but the drivers I have are listed for the wrong model and won't work. I just bought a Netgear /w a (atheros) AR5212 chipset :-)