dwasifar's daily gripe

I have an old Dell laptop with an ATI Radeon RV250 (Mobility FireGL 9000) running a 1400×1050 panel. When I moved this machine to Karmic, my desktop was black, with no desktop items appearing on it; but you could see the desktop wallpaper beneath the semi-transparent top panel.

This turns out to be a problem with rendering acceleration in Karmic for this video chipset.  A quick and dirty fix is to turn off desktop effects.  (System>Preferences>Appearance>Visual Effects and select None.)  But there’s no reason to give up desktop effects if you still want them, so try this instead to fix it.

In terminal, run these two commands:

grep XAA /var/log/Xorg.0.log
grep EXA /var/log/Xorg.0.log

One of them will return nothing; the other will return something like this:

(**) RADEON(0): Option “AccelMethod” “EXA”
(**) RADEON(0): Using EXA acceleration architecture

or

(**) RADEON(0): Option “AccelMethod” “XAA”
(**) RADEON(0): Using XAA acceleration architecture

This tells you which method is currently in use on your system. Probably it will be EXA.

If it reported EXA:

In terminal, do this:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

This will give you a text editor window. Paste this into the text editor:

Section “Device”
Identifier “my-radeon”
Driver “ati”
Option “AGPSize” “128″
EndSection

(You can try larger values in place of 128 if your system has more video memory than that, but most of the people who have been having this problem don’t.)

Save the file and exit the editor, and reboot.

If the problem still isn’t solved when you have rebooted, open the file in text editor again, and change it to look like this:

Section “Device”
Identifier “my-radeon”
Driver “ati”
Option “AccelMethod” “XAA”
EndSection

Then save the file and exit the editor, and reboot.

Both of these solved the problem for me. The first one (with the AGPSize option) is the preferred choice and will result in better performance.

If it reported XAA, you might want to try enabling EXA to see if that helps.  In terminal, do this:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

This will give you a text editor window. Paste this into the text editor:

Section “Device”
Identifier “my-radeon”
Driver “ati”
Option “AccelMethod” “EXA”
EndSection

Save, and reboot, and see if the problem is solved.

Update 01/27/10: Reader CJP discovered an extra step that may be needed in some systems.  If you’ve gotten this far and it still doesn’t work for you, please check the comments for his additions.