Radeon Linux IBM Thinkpad Infinite loop Blue Screen of Death BSOD

Normal people, feel free to ignore this post, I fixed a problem on my laptop and I'm trying to publish the solution. I'm sure Google will find this. I'll put up some real posts soon, I'm busy packing for home tonight.

Thanks.


My IBM Thinkpad R51 started crashing in Linux and BSODing in Windows XP (it's a dual-boot.) The BSOD screen would say something like

//
// The driver for the display device got stuck in an infinite loop. This
// usually indicates a problem with the device itself or with the device
// driver programming the hardware incorrectly. Please check with your
// display device vendor for any driver updates.
//

This is apparently a problem with these laptop Radeon cards.

There is a lovely fix for this in Windows XP. It is here:
here

Basically, you tell Windows to use this card as a PCI card, as opposed to an AGP one. (My hunch is that this kills graphic performance, but I don't play any graphically intense games on my laptop anyway, so I haven't really noticed it.) This solution works great for Windows, but I was really digging the Linux and wanted a similar fix.

Well, it turn out there IS an equivalent fix, and predictably, it involves editing a text file. Boot your Linux into safe mode. (This was really easy on my Ubuntu machine, it was just another GRUB option.) If you can't boot into safe mode, boot normally, and just try and do this quickly before it crashes (I believe it's a heating issue, so you should have a little time.) Open xorg.conf in your favorite text editor (I used emacs, but most things should work. vi, nano, etc.) You may have to/should do this as root, I'm not sure. I did it as root, and it worked for me. It's in the /etc/X11 directory. Find the device section. Mine looked like this:

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon Mobility 9000 (M7 LW)"
Driver "ati"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Just before the EndSection line, add this line:
Option "BusType" "PCI"

Make sure the spacing is the same as for other items. (Use TABs to line it up nicely. I don't know if this is critical or not, but there's no reason not to line it up.) Save the file, and restart the X server (or just reboot, but apparently Linux people are so proud that they don't have to reboot regularly like Windows people that they would encourage restarting the xserver. Whatever that means.)

It should work now. It's probably slower, but whatever. It's better than crashing constantly. This worked for me, I hope it works for you too. I think the worst case scenario is that it may stop the xserver from running at all, and then you can probably just take it back out. You may want to backup your xorg.conf before trying this. Good luck!

Oh, thanks a lot to this website, this is where I found the magic option command:
here


That's it.