Red Hat Knowledgebase

The Radeon driver that ships with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 does not work with the Radeon x### family of cards. The current workaround is to load the vesa driver instead. To do this, change the driver in the "Device" section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf from:

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
	Driver      "radeon"
	VendorName  "ATI"
	BoardName   "ATI Radeon X600"
EndSection

to:

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
	Driver      "vesa"
	VendorName  "ATI"
	BoardName   "ATI Radeon X600"
EndSection

Edit xorg.conf file in runlevel 3. A link to an article of how to boot into runlevel 3 is on related articles at the bottom of this article.

Note: The vesa driver is an alternative to other drivers that are recommended only when the specific driver for the card is unsupported or has complications. Note that the vesa driver makes slower writes to the graphics card.