I'm delighted to find this version of StackExchange as I normally lurk in the GIS board. I would greatly appreciate help with the following problem (which seems to be quite common - but I am just starting to wean myself off Windows so I don't fully understand how to achieve what should be a simple task as every solution I find seems to raise another problem):
I have an old PC which I want to set up as a 'lab-rat' to learn Linux. I have Debian Wheezy installed (as the only operating system) but GNOME 3 fails to load and I get the fall-back GUI. I have an old ATI Radeon 9250 graphics card and believe I need to install drivers for this. I have read and attempted to follow the Debian AtiHowTo but when I get to the bit about editing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf
file, things fall apart because I don't have this file. I read here that this file no longer exists by default and must be created although that advice is on a Ubuntu forum, though I believe Ubuntu is based on Debian so could that be my issue here? The 'offical' Debian site mentioned previously makes no reference of needing to create the /etc/X11/xorg.conf
file, however, I attempted to create the file as directed on the Ubuntu site anyway but that also fails.
I'm sure this is a simple problem for seasoned Linux users and I would appreciate supplementary directions of how to install the ATI Radeon driver mentioned in the AtiHowTo as I have no idea how to proceed.
EDIT:
I followed the instructions in the accepted answer on Ubuntu site mentioned above (I didn't understand this initially but now do). I now have an xorg.conf file and it includes a section for DEVICE radeon, which pretty much matches the simple definition in the AtiHowTo page. I suspect I now need to restart GNOME. I found this advice on this board, but when I follow this advice I got a message "Stopping GNOME" and then the log-in screen again but I still have no GNOME and don't know whether the driver is installed. What do I do now?
EDIT 2
Result of $glxinfo | grep render:
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 0x209)
GL_NV_conditional_render, GL_AMD_draw_buffers_blend,
xorg.conf
file manually./var/log/Xorg.0.log
and look for hiccups in there.glxinfo | grep render
?