Configuring Slitz to Use ATI Graphics Hardware with the Radeon Driver

Slitaz Linux is a fast, tiny and fun Linux distro that I have been using on and off over the years.  I was a bit surprised when I downloaded and booted into a live session of Slitaz 5.0 (rolling) from a USB flash drive, to find myself looking at a command line login.  I had chosen the graphical desktop option, but X had failed to start.

I logged in to the console that presented itself as root with the password root.  Fortunately, the networking was already enabled with DHCP, so I was able to do a little configuration to get to a graphical session.

It seems the required drivers were not present for my GPU, which lspci lists as:  VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Kabini [Radeon HD 8280 / R3 Series]

So, I ran the command:

# tazhw setup ati

This pulled in the ATI Xorg driver, xorg-xf86-video-ati and all its dependencies, and I was able to get to a graphical desktop by issuing the command:

#startx

From here the installation to my hard drive was uneventful, and the process is well documented at slitaz.org.  I had a real problem when booting back into the system from my grub menu after shutdown, though.  It appears networking starts after the configuration of the graphical environment, and I was stuck with a hanging system.  I let it run about 10 minutes and did not get to a login, so I powered off the system with the power button.

Here are the steps I took to rescue my Slitaz installation.  Fortunately, I already had a Debian installation on another partition of my hard drive, so I booted into that.  Failing this, I could have downloaded any Linux distro that can boot into live mode and used that environment.  Possibly, I could have booted back into a Slitaz live session from my USB flash drive.  The essential thing is to get to an environment that supports chroot.  First I needed to know to which partition I installed Slitaz, so I ran:

# fdisk -l

I discovered it was /dev/sda7 in my case so I ran:

# mount /dev/sda7 /mnt

To prepare the chroot environment to have a functional Internet connection, I issued these commands

# cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt
# mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc
# mount -o bind /sys /mnt//sys

Then entering the Slitaz busybox chroot with

# chroot /mnt  /bin/ash

Once in the chroot environment, I repeated the command I ran earlier from the Slitaz console:

# tazhw setup ati

At the end I got a prompt, "Do you want to configure X using free ATI (radeon) driver [y/N] ? " that I was not able to respond to, but I just ignored this.

 For good measure, I installed some other AMD/ATI related packages with;

/ # tazpkg get-install amd-microcode

/ # tazpkg get-install xorg-xf86-video-radeonhd

/ # tazpkg get-install libdrm-radeon

/ # tazpkg get-install firmware-radeon

Then I exited the chroot, unmounted the Slitaz partition, and rebooted.  This time everything started normally with the proper graphics configuration.