ati driver with Radeon 9800XT

[Shaun Friedle]

Hi,
My friend is trying out FreeBSD as a desktop OS, and I am aiding him
since I have be using FreeBSD for about 10 months now and have
successfully been using FreeBSD without many problems (that weren't my
fault).

Unfortunately he seems to be encountering more problems than I suspected
he would, and now he has encountered one I am unable to solve - if he
uses the ati driver then when he types startx he gets a hard lock, the
monitor goes into standby and the machine will respond to no key
combinations. If he uses vesa everything is fine. This is on 5.3 Beta 7.
His motherboard is an MSI KT6 Delta-FIS2R.

I encountered a similar thing with my nvidia card, which was solved by
disabling ACPI and compiling my kernel without SMP, but this seems to
have to effect on his problem. I can't seem to find any information on
this problem with Google, so I hope someone can help or I think he will
return to Windows.
-- 
Shaun Friedle
shaun at insipidity.co.uk