Wine and Radeon 9800 SE (AIW)

motub@planet.nl
Mon, 26 Jan 2004 10:13:01 -0000

Hi,

Short version of a long story: I used to run Wine with moderate success
when I had a Matrox G400. Recently I upgraded to the above videocard. I
run 4 different distros, but the only one I've been able to get the ATI
drivers installed and working on is Mandrake 9.2, so for the purposes of
this post, I use Mandrake 9.2.

Here's the thing. Linux binaries run fine and look great. If I try to
run Wine (so far I've tried 20031212,20040121 and WineX 3.2.1 from
http://www003.portalis.it/115/ ), however, my monitor immediately does
black and then to hardware standby (no signal). If I turn it back on,
the little light above the BNC (/D-SUB) blinks, and I have no picture of
any sort except a "widescreen" gray roiling nothingness. I cannot even
open another X server with CTR:-ALT-F1 or logout with CTRL-ALT-Backspace
(or if I can, I can't see it)-- I have to hard reset to get a monitor
signal again.

The program I'm using to test my Wine install is Double Deck Solitaire
95, which can be found at
http://www.filelibrary.com/Contents/Windows/115/16.html (program # 578,
ddsol95.zip). If anyone takes a look at this game, you'll see that it's
not a rendering monster of any sort (which is why I use it to test with,
aside from that I like it).

Now I should say-- I do get a picture back eventually. Like sometime
between 1.5 and 8 hours later. I don't know exactly how long, because I
get tired of checking and go to bed, and when I get up and turn the
monitor on and move the mouse, the desktop reappears-- with the game
running. I can play it, and it's fine. But obviously I'm not going to
try to run something more stressful for Wine under these circumstances.

So far I have done the following with no effect:

Tried different versions of Wine (and WineX) as above, but I have
versions going back to 20030907, so if anyone thinks an older version
(or compiling from source rather than using the MDK binaries) might not
show this  problem, please say;

Rolled the ATI drivers back from 3.7.0 to 3.2.8, which I had heard
people were able to use Wine with;

Changed various settings in the drivers using fglrxconfig, up to and
including turning off the "internal" AGPGART and using that of the
installed kernel. About all that I haven't done is changed from 24bit to
16bit, or changed from firegl "wine compatibility mode" to
"default" or
"fast" (since this isn't a FireGL board, that setting is supposed
to be
ignored anyway).

Transgaming has reported "some" problems with "the latest"
ATI drivers
(they didn't really specify much), but I did not expect the problem to
be so severe, or to occur under regular Wine as well, or to occur with
the old drivers.

Is this a problem that can be hacked, patched or troubleshot? Is there
something I can do to get Wine working? Or do I have to wait for ATI
and/or Wine-devel and/or Transgaming to work out a solution?

Thanks for any help or further information.

Holly Bostick