Radeon R100 firmware load fails for Lubuntu 14.04.1 install

[charlie_S]

I have had Lubuntu 12.10 running more or less OK on an old Compaq nx9010 laptop (Mobile Pentium 4, ATI graphics, 1GByte RAM).

Upgraded to Lubuntu 14.04.1 using the Alternate Installer downloaded from the Lubuntu Wiki, only to find no graphics apps available, I am assuming due to the following that appears in dmesg every boot:

Code: Select all

[   30.648449] radeon_cp: Failed to load firmware "radeon/R100_cp.bin"
[   30.648469] [drm:r100_cp_init] *ERROR* Failed to load firmware!
[   30.648480] radeon 0000:01:05.0: failed initializing CP (-2).
[   30.648485] radeon 0000:01:05.0: Disabling GPU acceleration
[   30.648495] [drm] radeon: cp finalized
[   30.648601] [drm] radeon: cp finalized

Did some Google research & concluded this could be the issue: https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo

Found out about the new location of the firmware-linux-nonfree package, but installing that did not fix the issue (it does not appear to contain any ATI specific firmware..

during this whole process, discovered some 'basic' packages like 'man' & 'wget' were not present in the base system installed using the Alternate installer,..

SO.. at this point, I am wondering... could something have failed with the alternate installer process ? Does anyone here have experience of installation of ATI/Radeon graphics drivers ??

thanks,
Charlie.

[Rex Bouwense]

Welcome to the LXDE forum Charlie. Unfortunately, I do not have any experience installing your ATI/Radeon graphics drivers. Is there a reason why you chose to download and use the alternate installer? Your 1 Gb of Ram is more than enough to install and run the regular Lubuntu version.

[charlie_S]

Hi Rex;
the LiveBoot image would not run (had the same issue with Lubuntu 12.10); somewhere there was a message to try the alternate installer; also the Alternate installer is slightly newer than the LiveBoot CD I have.

Meanwhile I found a solution, following the hints here: http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/nox (that page was suggested by some of the Google searching & something on the Ubuntu community pages).

It looks like the alternate installer does not install any of the packages needed for a normal desktop environment (or I pressed the wrong buttons): sudo apt-get lubuntu-desktop fixed the issue.

regards,
Charlie.

[Rex Bouwense]

Thanks for sharing. Often a poster does not return to share a solution when they find it on some other medium or forum. We appreciate it.