Howto for fglrx / catalyst (Ati driver)

[Fishboyfive]

i have followed the guide about 4 times now on 4 clean installs fedora 17 up to date each time with a XfX AMD HD7770

and every time i get a black screen on boot up with a picture of a little PC with a sad face telling me i need to contact my administrator.

I am not joking when i say I handed my AMD HD7770 to the trash man yesterday
what a waste of $150.00

i picked up a Nvidia GTX 560 today and i am already playing Diablo 3 and world of warcraft with 60+ FPS in fedora as we speak.

AMD just does not work in linux and if it does its so hit and miss its a wonder it even works in windows

[mercury305]

Originally Posted by StephenH

I'm getting the same message on my Acer Aspire One 722 (C50 processor, reports as Radeon HD 6250). However, I have also discovered that it does have problems. It will not suspend to RAM and resume. I only get a black screen.

I would like the increased performance of the proprietary driver, but not at the expense of stability and usability.

Have you tried the 12.6 Catalyst Driver?

[Fishboyfive]

That is the version in the rpmfusion repo.

Thanks for trying to help but I got an Nvidia card today no problems now. Gave my AMD card to the trash man so it's a tad to late now but I was sick of wasting time with AMD

[lala4yaya]

I'm sorry to report this did not work for me on f17-x86_64 w/ HD6870. It can load to the login screen and the mouse pointer moves but no controls can be activated by clicking or any keyboard. I can't even switch to another tty with ctrl+alt+f(n). ctrl+alt+backspace will reload the unresponsive login screen. do I need to put the mouse in xorg.conf?

[HMSS013]

i'm having a problem with GRUB hanging on boot after installing the catalyst drivers in Fedora 17

---------- Post added at 01:35 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:15 AM ----------

...wait the HD 2400 series isn't supported anymore that's no good...it worked with Fedora 14

[Fenrin]

Originally Posted by HMSS013

[...]

the support via the default Radeon drivers is decent for this card. Just use the free default driver. Another option is the 12.6 legacy beta driver, but if you want a stable driver which just works always choose the default driver.

boot into console mode will probably work if you add 3 to the kernel boot line. Then uninstall Catalyst (if you followed this guide via "yum remove *catalyst*") and reinstall mesa-libGL via yum.

Anyone want to test 12.6 with the 3.5 kernel?

Here's the module for the 3.5 kernel

http://buildsys.rpmfusion.org/plague...d/12.6-3.fc17/

Please leave feedback.

[varpa]

I upgraded from F16 to 17 yesterday and made the unpleasant discovery that my Radeon HD3450 was no longer supported by the fglrx/catalyst driver, and my machine would no longer start X windows. Several hours later, after reading many entries in this and other forums, I eventually to X to work with the "radeon" driver (which I guess is the "default" driver, though it took me a while to discover that).

Some questions/comments:

o A previous post in this formum says the radeon driver should be able to run at 1/3 to 1/2 the speed of the fglrx driver. My test with glxgears gives 60 fps with radeon, and used to give 4090 fps with fglrx, which is <2% of the speed. But maybe I am missing some acceleration parameter in my xorg.conf?

o I could not really find any config tool to use to set up my xorg.conf. There is livna-config-display but it only works for proprietary drivers. There is also "Xorg -configure", but this did not generate a working xorg.conf. In the end, I cobbled something together from an existing xorg.conf.

o Another forum post mentioned a legacy fglrx driver for older ATI/AMD cards like mine (xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-legacy,catalyst-legacy-kmod) and gave some links where source RPMs could be found. I built these (rpmbuild --rebuild) and installed them. However, when X started the screen went entirely black, and I could not even open a console with ctrl-alt-F2. But maybe I don't understand how to use and/or build these correctly. Will these packages ever be put on rpmfusion?

Thanks.

Originally Posted by varpa

I upgraded from F16 to 17 yesterday and made the unpleasant discovery that my Radeon HD3450 was no longer supported by the fglrx/catalyst driver, and my machine would no longer start X windows. Several hours later, after reading many entries in this and other forums, I eventually to X to work with the "radeon" driver (which I guess is the "default" driver, though it took me a while to discover that).

Some questions/comments:

o A previous post in this formum says the radeon driver should be able to run at 1/3 to 1/2 the speed of the fglrx driver. My test with glxgears gives 60 fps with radeon, and used to give 4090 fps with fglrx, which is <2% of the speed. But maybe I am missing some acceleration parameter in my xorg.conf?

o I could not really find any config tool to use to set up my xorg.conf. There is livna-config-display but it only works for proprietary drivers. There is also "Xorg -configure", but this did not generate a working xorg.conf. In the end, I cobbled something together from an existing xorg.conf.

o Another forum post mentioned a legacy fglrx driver for older ATI/AMD cards like mine (xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-legacy,catalyst-legacy-kmod) and gave some links where source RPMs could be found. I built these (rpmbuild --rebuild) and installed them. However, when X started the screen went entirely black, and I could not even open a console with ctrl-alt-F2. But maybe I don't understand how to use and/or build these correctly. Will these packages ever be put on rpmfusion?

Thanks.

Maybe if anyone ever reviews my requests.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpo...postcount=4622

[Fenrin]

Originally Posted by varpa

[...]
o A previous post in this formum says the radeon driver should be able to run at 1/3 to 1/2 the speed of the fglrx driver. My test with glxgears gives 60 fps with radeon, and used to give 4090 fps with fglrx, which is <2% of the speed. But maybe I am missing some acceleration parameter in my xorg.conf?

glxgears is not a benchmark tool.

Originally Posted by varpa

o I could not really find any config tool to use to set up my xorg.conf. There is livna-config-display but it only works for proprietary drivers. There is also "Xorg -configure", but this did not generate a working xorg.conf. In the end, I cobbled something together from an existing xorg.conf.

when you use the default driver you usually don't need the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Originally Posted by varpa

o Another forum post mentioned a legacy fglrx driver for older ATI/AMD cards like mine (xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-legacy,catalyst-legacy-kmod) and gave some links where source RPMs could be found. I built these (rpmbuild --rebuild) and installed them. However, when X started the screen went entirely black, and I could not even open a console with ctrl-alt-F2. But maybe I don't understand how to use and/or build these correctly. Will these packages ever be put on rpmfusion?

Thanks.

you can probably still boot into console mode, if you put 3 in the kernel boot line (when the grub menu appears, select the fedora entry, edit it, and add 3 where it says "linux /boot/vmlinuz....rhgb quiet", then boot it.
When the linux console appears you can remove the rpm package you installed, and reinstall mesa-libGL.

[varpa]

Thank you Yellowman/Fenrin for your answers, though they spur more questions:

o if glxgears is not a good benchmark, what is?

o I guess I am out of touch with Fedora X windows configuration. Fenrin says: "when you use the default driver you usually don't need the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf". Does this mean that I can remove xorg.conf and X windows will auto-configure to use the "default" driver? The answer seems to be yes - I removed (renamed, really), xorg.conf, and X seems to run fine without it.

o Thanks for the tip about the 3 in the kernal boot line. That would have saved me having to boot from a rescue disk to fix the X configuration.

Thanks for all the help, and lets hope rpmfusion adds the legacy drivers.

[Fenrin]

Originally Posted by varpa

Thank you Yellowman/Fenrin for your answers, though they spur more questions:

o if glxgears is not a good benchmark, what is?

you can use 3D games which are in the fedora repositories like openarena or vdrift. In case of openarena: change in the file ~/.openarena/q3config.cfgline the line <seta cg_drawFPS "0"> to<seta cg_drawFPS "1">

or you can use a Unigine engine demo:
for example: heaven demo there are also two other demos available.

or an alternative, I didn't test this benchmark program:
Phoronix Test Suit

Originally Posted by varpa

o I guess I am out of touch with Fedora X windows configuration. Fenrin says: "when you use the default driver you usually don't need the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf". Does this mean that I can remove xorg.conf and X windows will auto-configure to use the "default" driver? The answer seems to be yes - I removed (renamed, really), xorg.conf, and X seems to run fine without it.

yeah you don't need xorg.conf when using default driver. I think this is since Fedora 12.

Originally Posted by Yellowman

Anyone want to test 12.6 with the 3.5 kernel?

Here's the module for the 3.5 kernel

http://buildsys.rpmfusion.org/plague...d/12.6-3.fc17/

Please leave feedback.

Well the lack of interest here will result in a untested driver being pushed to stable.
So don't blame me if your fglrx.ko modules don't load with the 3.5 kernel


P.S I don't care either way as I use nvidia

---------- Post added at 10:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:59 PM ----------

The 3.5 kernel is currently being pushed to stable

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/upda...l-3.5.0-2.fc17

[HMSS013]

so wait...i've got possible dumb questions...but i gotta know:

...if i want support for my Radeon HD 2400 XT i can't use kmod-catalyst amirite?

...and if i'm reading these posts right...the generic drivers don't perform quite as admirably as the amd ones...right?

if this is all true...what are my options? ...just installing from the binary package amd provides? ...will this work?

...if so...what dependencies will i need to have to be assured the installation will run smoothly? ...any hang ups i'm to expect?

also, has anyone else heard of grub hanging at boot with F17?

...it seems to happen almost anytime i modify the kernel string or the grub conf file (in the other case i recall it happening i was trying to lower the delay time from 5 seconds to 0 and another time when i tried to add 3 for non-graphical boot)

Originally Posted by Yellowman

Well the lack of interest here will result in a untested driver being pushed to stable.
So don't blame me if your fglrx.ko modules don't load with the 3.5 kernel


P.S I don't care either way as I use nvidia

---------- Post added at 10:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:59 PM ----------

The 3.5 kernel is currently being pushed to stable

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/upda...l-3.5.0-2.fc17

Still no ****ing interest?