Trisquel 8 - Graphic Card Radeon HD

3 replies [Last post]
floppy
Offline
Joined: 09/20/2019

Hi,

I recently installed Trisquel 8 on an old Samsung R522.

All is fine but image or photos are displayed with a bad aspect ratio and they seems to be shrinked.

If I take a look to configuration, the screen has the following resolution 1024x768 61Hz. When my computer use Windows OS, the resolution was more like 1366x768.

If I run the command 'inxi -G', I get :

Graphics:  Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] RV710/M92 [Mobility Radeon HD 4330/4350/4550]
           Display Server: X.Org 1.18.4 driver: vesa
           Resolution: 1024x768@61.00hz
           GLX Renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 6.0, 128 bits)
           GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 18.0.5

If I run the command 'xrand', I get :

xrandr: Failed to get size of gamma for output default
Screen 0: minimum 800 x 600, current 1024 x 768, maximum 1024 x 768
default connected primary 1024x768+0+0 0mm x 0mm
   1024x768      61.00* 
   800x600       61.00  

The "Failed to get size of gamma" is probably not a good thing.

I try to correct the problem by manually install following packages :

firmware-amd-graphics_20161130-5~deb8u1_all.deb 
firmware-misc-nonfree_20161130-5~deb8u1_all.deb 
firmware-linux-nonfree_20161130-5~deb8u1_all.deb 

It does not change anything.

I try to rename the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.vesa to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
This modification add the resolution 800x600 but images are still shrinked.

Any idea to solve the problem ?
Thanks in advanced

nadebula.1984
Offline
Joined: 05/01/2018

Non-free firmware won't fix your problems and may be security vulnerabilities. Your notebook's graphics card is much older (at least 6~7 years older) than the non-free firmware packages you installed, so I'm afraid they can't address any problem that is relevant to your very old GPU. I remembered that I purchased an AMD HD4xxx series card in 2009 summer and used it to play some video games. The mobile version should have been released at almost the same time.

Go to your notebook's BIOS and see whether you can disable the discrete graphics card. If there is such options as "Integrated", then choose it. If you can't disable the discrete graphics, I recommend that you sell your current notebook and purchase one with only Intel's integrated graphics. For example, X200 or T400s is much better (and inexpensive now).

andyprough
Offline
Joined: 02/12/2015

I'm pretty sure the driver you want is the free radeon driver. It explicitly supports your RV710 card according to Debian and according to the reports of Trisquel users on h-node, and Debian reports that the non-free amdgpu driver is for later video cards:
https://packages.debian.org/buster/xserver-xorg-video-radeon
https://h-node.org/videocards/view/en/904/Advanced-Micro-Devices--AMD--nee-ATI-RV710--Mobility-Radeon-HD-4300-4500-Series-
https://h-node.org/videocards/view/en/215/ATI-RV710--Radeon-HD-4550-
https://h-node.org/videocards/view/en/11/Advanced-Micro-Devices--AMD--nee-ATI-RV710--Radeon-HD-4350-

On Trisquel the package you need should be in the main repository and should be called xserver-xorg-video-ati:
https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=xserver-xorg-video-ati
https://mirror.fsf.org/trisquel/pool/main/x/xserver-xorg-video-ati/

jxself
Online
Joined: 09/13/2010

It can't hurt to try a newer kernel just in case: https://jxself.org/linux-libre/