ATI Says No Devices Found

My buddy Tom E. has been experimenting with writing a X-windows framework in C++. He wanted me to look over his source code and get it running. This motivated me to get X Windows running again my Linux box. It has been many distributions and kernels ago since I've run X. Mostly my Linux box acts as a server. I secure shell (ssh) into it whenever I need to do anything.

So I downloaded the latest version of the ATI proprietary drivers. It seems to install successfully but X fails to start. I see the following message: "No devices found". Grr. After tweaking my xorg.conf with no success I decided to get X running with the generic VGA drivers. This time it failed with a message about being unable to load the default fixed font.

I poured over online forums discussions. Eventually I discovered that between distributions of Fedora, they decided to move files around including the fonts. They now live in /usr/share/X11/fonts. I modify the xorg.conf file again as I shake my fist at Fedora. Finally I had success!

The issue with the ATI driver bugged me. I used the lspci to determine what kind of Radeon card I had in my PC.

$ lspci | fgrep -i radeon

It told me I had a Radeon 8500 LE. Oh, no wonder! According to the ATI drivers page they no longer support the Radeon 8500 as version 8.28.8. I was trying to use the latest version, 8.35.5. So it turns out "No devices found" really means "We don't support your crusty old video card". Fortunately I remembered I had a Radeon 9800 Pro as the result of a recent upgrade. I installed the card and rebooted. X now works in all of its accelerated glory. Hurrah!