I still doubt if this’ll be fixable, but the output from:
sudo lshw -C display
for the cards certainly can’t hurt 
Card1 (Red)
chloe@Linux3 ~ $ sudo lshw -C display
[sudo] password for chloe:
*-display:0
description: VGA compatible controller
product: RV370 [Radeon X600/X600 SE]
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: 00
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=radeon latency=0
resources: irq:40 memory:d0000000-dfffffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:febf0000-febfffff memory:febc0000-febdffff
*-display:1 UNCLAIMED
description: Display controller
product: RV380 [Radeon X300/X550/X1050 Series] (Secondary)
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
physical id: 0.1
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.1
version: 00
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm pciexpress bus_master cap_list
configuration: latency=0
resources: memory:febe0000-febeffff
chloe@Linux3 ~ $
Card2 (Green)
chloe@Linux3 ~ $ sudo lshw -c display
[sudo] password for chloe:
*-display:0
description: VGA compatible controller
product: RV370 [Radeon X300]
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: 00
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=radeon latency=0
resources: irq:40 memory:d8000000-dfffffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:febf0000-febfffff memory:febc0000-febdffff
*-display:1 UNCLAIMED
description: Display controller
product: RV370 [Radeon X300 SE]
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
physical id: 0.1
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.1
version: 00
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm pciexpress bus_master cap_list
configuration: latency=0
resources: memory:febe0000-febeffff
chloe@Linux 3 ~ $
@ Mark
I’ve ordered the card you posted in your post hopefully I’ll have it in a few days and like chemicalfan I’ll never buy another AMD/ATI anything as long as I live
Many thanks
Graeme
Nah, forget it … RV370 and RV380 are only supported by the old Catalyst 9.3 driver, and that won’t work with newer versions of Xorg
So short of downgrading Xorg somehow…
Might be worth playing with some of the settings in the “videoplayer” section of
gedit ~/.kodi/userdata/guisettings.xml
and seeing if that makes any difference.
That seems to be where the configs are stored
I think you’ll agree Mark it’s not worth it, you did say from the get go it was highly unlikely to work
Hopefully I’ll get the the nVidia card before the weekend because that’s when Chloe comes to stay with us and lately she’s been using XBMC a lot to watch her music videos and grandad wont be very popular if it doesn’t work
Thank again for your help
Graeme
Heh, you obviously have more faith in Royal Mail than I do 
Again, while the propriatory drivers are a bust, the open-source ones might work, and may even be good enough for 3D compositing (those cards were DirectX9 compatible, so not like they are out of the ark). They might not be supported by the current default xorg driver (I never remember the correct AMD/ATI driver names!), but the older ones are still valid under the current Xorg, as far as I can tell. I’ll check more at lunch.
More info here:
They most definitely ARE supported under the open source “radeon” driver, indeed that’s what they’re currently using … but I gather (from googling) xbmc now requires something only fglrx provides … tons of people seem to be having the same problem with xbmc and the “radeon” drivers 
That’s crap, and really anti-FOSS >:(
I guess it’s because it must use GPGPU-type tech, that isn’t working under the open-source driver at present. Maybe I’m missing the point - isn’t XBMC just a media player with a nice GUI?
Not saying it makes sense, just that (according to google) there’s a lot of it about
Maybe things will improve with AMD now freeing up their code, but I get the feeling even the radeon driver is just gonna concentrate on newer cards.
And in any case, that doesn’t help Emegra NOW
True, although alternative video players don’t require the extra bits Catalyst provides, so unless there’s functionality required that’s specific to XBMC, I’d be looking towards them. It’d be a free solution, implementable now, rather than if/when Royal Fail deliver the nice new nVidia card.
Ok I got the video card as per this link http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MSI-GeForce-GT-210-1GB-Graphics-Card-Low-Profile-PCI-Express-2-0x16-589MHz-HDMI-/331328684791
When i first installed the card the PC stalled during boot but I managed to get it to boot with nomodeset then in additional drivers I was offered 4 proprietary drivers so I selected the first one rebooted and couldn’t get a resolution higher than 640x480 so I selected the second option and It won’t boot at all I’ve tried nomodest & xforcevesa, each time it stalls with a message at the top of the screen “[ 55.788024] hda-intel 0000:01:00.1 : no codecs initialised” followed below with a flashing cursor,
This PC’s monitor is connected through a KVM box and I’ve tried bypassing the box and plugging in the monitor directly into the PC but that made no difference either, I can boot up if I remove the card and connect to the onboard graphics but that’s kinda defeating the whole purpose of the exercise,
So is there any way I can remove the offending driver so I can boot up and select another driver
Many thanks
Graeme
Problem solved
It only occurred to me after my last post to try an earlier kernel so I selected another kernel and that booted the PC I was then able to select another driver under “Additional Drivers” (304 Legacy proprietary) and it seems to be working fine and XBMC is loading up and working perfectly
Many thanks
Graeme
Terrific, happy to hear you got it working
Can I suggest that if you’re running XBMC that you switch to Kodi … it seems MUCH smoother than the older XBMC on my machines.
Can I suggest that if you're running XBMC that you switch to Kodi .. it seems MUCH smoother than the older XBMC on my machines.
I still have Kodi installed from the PPA you gave me on a previous post and it’s running very smooth, no doubt Chloe will put it through it’s paces this weekend
Many thanks
Graeme
I dunno much about XBMC (never used it much), but I do remember (at least on my hardware) the mouse cursor seemed to lag badly on the initial screens, which kinda put me off.
That behaviour has gone since they’ve renamed to Kodi
Yeah Mark you’re absolutely right, that’s something I noticed as well and it’s something that stopped me using XBMC on the PC for a long time but to be honest it seemed to improve dramatically on later versions of XBMC
I only recently tried XBMC again because I wanted a easy means for Chloe to have access to her music videos and some other content without giving her access to the NAS, also she’s already familiar with XBMC as she uses it on softmodded Xboxes in her room here and at home.
Graeme