[SOLVED] X not recognizing open source ATI driver

Question

Greetings all,
I have spent some time searching the forum as well as the wiki for something along the lines of what is going on with my laptop.  Maybe there is something there and I am not providing the correct search criteria.
First some history and what I have done thus far.
I re-installed Arch yesterday.  I had (prior to this install) KDE installed and then installed E17.  I added exec ck-launch-session enlightenment_start to my .xinitrc file and when I entered startx it loaded without a hitch. 
Being that this is an older laptop, I found KDE put to much strain on the CPU and decided to just run E17 solo due to it's light footprint.
So I re-installed Arch.  No problem there.  Installed all the required stuff like xorg mesa, hal, dbus, fam etc.  I have an ATI video card in this laptop so like before, I installed "xf86-video-ati" as per the wiki.
I added exec enlightenment_start in my .xinitrc file then launched with "startx"
I do not receive any errors and E launches but the problem I have is the 1st screen does not fully load.  It's scrambled so I can't do anything.  I did not have this problem when I had KDE installed but I do not want to re-install KDE.
Any and all responses and guidance are most appreciated.
All the best, and have a great weekend,
Ian
Edited to add additional info:  I wanted to add a couple of things that I looked at or tried.
When I run glxgears I get the following error:
[ichase@ichase~]$ glxgears
Error: couldn't open display (null)
When I looked at my /etc/X11/xorg.conf under devices I am seeing
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "vesa"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
If I am reading it correctly, according the the ATI Arch Wiki the Identifier should read what ever my graphics card name is and the Driver should read "Radeon"
I'm starting to think that when I installed the xf86-video-ati driver that it did not take.  Maybe I should try and re-install again.
Any thoughts?
Thanks again. 
Last edited by ichase (2011-03-16 16:07:54)

Answer 1

@codeRage - I appologize for taking so long to reply.  Had some personal stuff come up that kept me away from the computer.
To answer your question about the output here it is:
ichase@ichase~ $ lsmod | grep radeon
radeon 723481 1
ttm 38517 1 radeon
drm_kms_helper 21512 1 radeon
drm 131562 3 radeon,ttm,drm_kms_helper
i2c_algo_bit 4219 1 radeon
i2c_core 15144 5 radeon,drm_kms_helper,drm,i2c_algo_bit,i2c_pii X4
Hopefully this tells something.  I re-installed Arch and re-installed Enlightenment.  I also re-installed the open source ATI driver.  I was actually able to get into Enlightenment this time but I am still showing that I am running off the vesa driver and not the ATI driver. 
/etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "vesa"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
Another thing I noticed, I was able to run "glxgears" this time with this output
{ichase@ichase~}$ glxgears
225 frames in 5.0 seconds = 44.952 FPS
226 frames in 5.0 seconds = 45.018 FPS
225 frames in 5.0 seconds = 44.947 FPS
XI0: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server ":0.0" after 8134 request (7306 known processed) with 0 events remaining
@sriracha - I have not tried removing the xorg.conf file yet.  After the re-install, I did not get the error again but if I do, I will post it.
Thanks you all for the help and hope everyone is coming off a great weekend.
All the best,
Ian