I finally decided to get rid of my ancient nvidia graphic board and bought a Sapphire Radeon R5 230 with 2GB RAM for 46,40 €uros. The vendor chose GLS as delivery service, so no tracking number. Of course it didn’t arrive at the announced day. I had to ask the vendor and eventually picked it up in a not so close boutique.
Well, once I had it, assembly wasn’t much of a problem. Configuring X was. Took me five hours to get it right!
First, I had to figure out which driver to use, which isn’t as easy as it seems. Turns out to be radeon, not amdgpu. Without any configuration the radeon kernel module is loaded, which is right, by the way, but X can’t figure out what driver to use. By default it uses amdgpu if installed. Well, wrong choice.
Create a configuration with
# X -configure
and change the Driver from amdgpu to radeon. Then remove the vnc module in Section “Module” and the Screens in Section “ServerLayout”. X identifies 2 Devices, one for VGA output, and one for DVI, or so I thought. Actually, the card has another output: HDMI for TV-out, which happens to be the default. Very clever! Disable it by adding this to the kernel command line:
video=HDMI-A-1:d
Now set the option ZaphodHeads to “VGA-0,DVI-0” in both device Sections. That should get you up and running. SDDM still doesn’t work, but startx will. SDDM requires some xrandr magic in Xsetup, which I haven’t figured out yet.
Anyway, it was worth it! No more annoying delays when playing videos while writing text in LibreOffice! In total the system feels much faster now.
You can marvel at the whole config here.