sddsplot error with Fedora-11 and ATI Radeon graphic card

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yjkim
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sddsplot error with Fedora-11 and ATI Radeon graphic card

Post by yjkim » 10 Nov 2009, 09:47

I installed Fedora-11 on my new Dell OPTIPLEX 960 workstation.
The workstation has an ATI Radeon HD4670 graphic card and a SynchMaster 24.6 inch P2570 monitor.

Whenever I plot 6D beam distribution plots with sddsplot, I found that sddsplot does not plot the beam distribuiton properly.
At the first time, I assumed that there is a bug in ELEGANT or SDDStoolkit.
But later I found that this is a graphic card driver issue.

If you use sddsplot with Fedora-11 and ATI Radeon graphic card, you may meet beam chopping or
collimation problem in 6D beam distribution. Some parts of bottom area will be collimated or chopped on the plots.
This is due to the improper ATI Radeon graphic card driver, which was pre-installed in Fedora-11 installation package.

You can update your ATI Radeon graphic card driver by using following steps.
Before finishing careful reading of whole things below, please do not go any step:


Step 0. Clean: if you previously installed AMD ATI graphic card driver by using the binary package
provided by AMD ATI, first of all, you must un-install the AMD ATI driver, which makes your computer very slow.

then repair Mesa:
swan [1] su
swan [2] yum reinstall mesa-libGL

Step 1. Update kernel
swan [1] su
swan [2] yum update kernel
reboot with the new kernel


Step 2. install the Fedora-11 rpmfusion driver. If your kernel is PAE, please follow ways below.
If your kernel is not PAE, please look into following website for your kernel update:
After updating kernel similar ways (by looking into website below). then move to Step 3:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=155503

Only for PAE kernel:
swan [1] su -
swan [2] rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/ ... noarch.rpm
swan [3] rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fed ... noarch.rpm
swan [4] yum install kmod-catalyst-PAE xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-libs.i586 xorg-x11-drv-catalyst


Step 3. Backup Old initrd
swan [1] su
swan [2] mv /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img.backup


Step 4. Remake initrd for the kernel (So the radeon module is not force loaded)
swan [1] su -
swan [2] mkinitrd -v /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img `uname -r`


Step 5. Edit grub.conf and add "nopat" to the kernel arguments.
swan [1] su
swan [2] gedit /boot/grub/grub.conf
then add "nopat" such as:

default=0
timeout=0
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.30.9-96.fc11.i686.PAE)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.30.9-96.fc11.i686.PAE ro root=UUID=2886f435-aac3-4345-96eb-95b4787314ec rhgb quiet nopat
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.30.9-96.fc11.i686.PAE.img

Then, save grub.conf

Step 6. reboot your computer

Step 7. You can find that now, your ATI Radeon card work properly with sddsplot.
Additionally, you can find it, it is much faster than Nvidia Graphic card with same RAM size.

If you want to know more details, please see

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=155503

Or send e-mail to me (ykim68@indiana.edu).


Yujong Kim
Indiana University Cyclotron Facility (IUCF).

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