Lukasz.dk

Ubuntu 8.10 and ATI Dual Head

Posted by Lukasz Bruun - 17/03/09 at 21:46:29

Yesterday I was trying to a get dual monitor configuration / virtual desktop (VGA and DVI)  working in GNOME (Ubuntu 8.10) on my ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT graphics card with a 1920×1200 DVI screen and 1600×1200 VGA screen connected, using the proprietary FGLRX ATI driver from the Ubuntu repositories. I tried various resources on the net to make it work, including the  ATI Big-Desktop thread at the Ubuntu Forums.

I was unsuccessful in getting dualhead working using only the commandline aticonfig tool, so after a bit (actually alot :) of experimenting I was able to get working with using a combination of aticonfig and the Catalyst Control Center (amdcccle) tool.

First thing I did was create an initial xorg.conf configuration file using the command below in shell, which sets up a basic dualhead configuration which can be altered using aticonfig and the Catalyst Control Center.

sudo aticonfig –initial=dual-head –overlay-type=Xv

I then rebooted (I was not always able to reload the driver by just restarting X). I then started the Catalyst Control Center by typing the following in a shell

sudo amdcccle

Its important to use sudo or else you wont be able to change the configuration. In the “Display Manager” section it is possible to setup the multi-display and specify how the screens are arranged. After you set this, reboot once again.

What should happen now is that when you restart you get the same image on both screens (mirrored/cloned). You now need to enter the GNOME Screen Resolution configuration application (which in the default Ubuntu GNOME  setup is located under System – Preferences). Here you should now be able to change the size of the desktop so that it uses the entire screenspace on both screens.

One thing to note is that I also tried the very latest (9.2) ATI FGLRX driver, using this driver I actually got 2 screens in the GNOME Screen Resolution application. They were positioned on top of each other (Mirror Screens was checked), which was  hard to see (and figure out). But you can actually click on the screens and then drag and arrange them so that they match you physical screen configuration. So you may want to try the latest driver if the one in the Ubuntu repositories does not work for you.

lzrt – Lukasz’ Ray Tracer

Posted by Lukasz Bruun - 28/01/09 at 11:58:18

As part of my master thesis in computer science I developed a ray tracing application called lzrt – Lukasz’ Ray Tracer for the Cell processor. Besides from running on the Cell processor, lzrt also runs on x86 and PowerPC. I’m releasing the source code, test scenes and other information regarding lzrt for those interested in the technical details. The ray tracer does not have any advanced graphical features, as my focus was on optimizing the search for the nearest triangle a ray hits, using a kd-tree as an acceleration structure for scenes where the 3D objects move.

For more information, click here.

Ubuntu and Winfast 2000XP EXPERT (LR6611)

Posted by Lukasz Bruun - 25/01/09 at 23:00:27

After a clean install of Ubuntu 8.10 my OEM TV tuner card called LR6611 (came with a AOpen XC Cube EA 65-II) was no longer working and I had forgotten how I made it work years ago. The cx88xx video4linux driver is correctly loaded, but the card is not detected.  S-video and video works in tvtime out of the box, but the quality is poor.

Below is the output from lspci -vnn

01:06.0 Multimedia video controller [0400]: Conexant Systems, Inc.
CX23880/1/2/3 PCI Video and Audio Decoder [14f1:8800] (rev 05)

    Subsystem: AOPEN Inc. Device [a0a0:6f05]

    Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 17

    Memory at e3000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]

    Capabilities: <access denied>

    Kernel driver in use: cx8800

    Kernel modules: cx8800

After some searching I found some information on this card on the  video4linux-list. Turns out that this card is a Leadtek Winfast 2000XP Expert OEM variant, which you can also conclude from searching for ‘LR6611′ in Google.

I used the information from the video4linux-list to configure the card by the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/options

options cx88xx i2c_scan=1 card=5 tuner=38

Now the card will be correctly configured when booting Ubuntu. You can also test the card without rebooting, by entering the following commands in a shell.

sudo rmmod cx8800
sudo rmmod cx88xx
sudo modprobe cx88xx
sudo modprobe cx8800

You can watch TV channels in tvtime now. When scanning for channels, do not worry about the “no signal” message, the scanner will eventually find the available channels.

S-video and video input quality has also greatly improved compared to the default cx88xx settings for this card.

Search