Howto for fglrx / catalyst (Ati driver)

[piotrekf88]

Hi
On Fedora 16 LXDE Spin, lxdm is not starting after installation of ati catalyst drivers (version 11.12). As suggested on https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=748169 it can be fixed by removing "-background vt1" in /etc/lxdm/lxdm.conf:

arg=/usr/bin/X # -background vt1

I'm posting it here, because it's the first thread i found while searching for help. If this isn't the right place, sorry.

[tuxtard]

12.1 is out. It is stable for now. No glitches or crashes for me on Gnome 3

[bigflopper2]

Originally Posted by tuxtard

12.1 is out. It is stable for now. No glitches or crashes for me on Gnome 3

On F16?

I'm using F16, what do you think...should I give it a try and install 12.1, I've got the radeon hd 5450.

[tuxtard]

Damn it, gnome-shell still crashes sometimes. It happens less frequently then before, but it still happens. Also video playback in Xv is still broken.

@bigflopper
Well Gnome 3 still crashes from time to time, but if you are using KDE like me there is no reason why you shouldn't try proprietary drivers. Also if you are using SMplayer or MPlayer to play videos you can switch render to GL. With GL video playback works normally.

[hh2ohexhh]

Hi, I'm not trying to start an argument, but perhaps it's not all ATI's fault.

About a couple of minutes ago I got this when updating:

Updated kmod-catalyst-3.2.2-1.fc16.x86_64-11.11-1.fc16.5.x86_64 ?
Update 11.11-1.fc16.12.x86_64 @rpmfusion-nonfree-updates

Now I'm getting glxgears -info:

31896 frames in 5.0 seconds = 6379.109 FPS
32184 frames in 5.0 seconds = 6436.491 FPS
26289 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5257.787 FPS
30350 frames in 5.0 seconds = 6069.810 FPS
31187 frames in 5.0 seconds = 6237.243 FPS
28914 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5782.692 FPS

Of course, under Gnome 3 it'll go down to (approximatly) 2500 FPS, but at least it's something.

I've got a Radeon HD 5750 (also using the forced fallback mode for gaming). Gome 3 crashes sometimes, but like I said, maybe there are some compilation issues (face value) ...

HH

[bigflopper2]

If you wanna have a well-performing system don't use that ****** driver, it's unacceptable for me if gnome sometimes crashes, it's outrageous and sometimes tedious if the driver causes gnome to crash...use the open source driver...

[deanej]

Which is where? The post doesn't say. All I know is the one that came with F16 does NO power or temperature management to speak of, causing me to have three times more power used than in Windows.

[JamesNZ]

Originally Posted by deanej

Which is where? The post doesn't say. All I know is the one that came with F16 does NO power or temperature management to speak of, causing me to have three times more power used than in Windows.

The one that comes with fedora (which is what you're using) is the open-source mesa driver. If you want to use the proprietary drivers, which have the power control you want, you can get it from the rpmfusion nonfree repo.

Assuming you have that repo then just run:

yum install xorg-x11-drv-catalyst xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-libs xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-devel akmod-catalyst

[ShivaS]

So I take it that xorg-x11-drv-ati.x86_64 : Xorg X11 ati video driver is the open-source ATI driver?
Does it have better performance than the vesa one? I'm not gameing on my laptop; i just want a crisp screen, with no parasites and a little 3D for VirtualBox

[Fenrin]

Originally Posted by ShivaS

So I take it that xorg-x11-drv-ati.x86_64 : Xorg X11 ati video driver is the open-source ATI driver?
Does it have better performance than the vesa one? I'm not gameing on my laptop; i just want a crisp screen, with no parasites and a little 3D for VirtualBox

yes the open source radeon driver is much faster than Vesa. You don't have to install this radeon driver. It should be installed and used by default.

If you need power management/saving features you can try this, but the closed source driver is better with power saving. If you have a low power card like Mobility Radeon 3200 or something like that, it doesn't matter much.

Faster than the open source driver is AMD's Catalyst driver. But you probably don't need it.

[ShivaS]

Actually, the driver is installed but not used by the system???. This might be related to the high CPU and memory used by Firefox
Here's what KDE is reporting (just ignore the language):

[Fenrin]

the right radeon driver is used. I see this with the line "Gallium 0.4 on ATI RV530". Fedora 15 and later uses Gallium (Mesa) drivers as default like most modern linux distros now. If you want to test the classic mesa driver, you could use a RHEL based distro like CentOS or Scientific Linux. Could be that classic mesa is better on your radeon card. Maybe it makes also a difference if you use a lightweight desktop instead of KDE, especially if you have less than 2 GB RAM.

if you put radeon.modeset=0 in the kernel boot line, it will use Vesa drivers which will be even slower.

the rpmfusion or Catalyst driver is not a option for you, because your card is a bit too old.

to decrease RAM and CPU usage of Firefox you can remove the Adobe flashplugin. Quite some sites still use flash, but YouTube works also fine without it. And it will result in a much lower RAM and CPU usage of Firefox. Adblock Plus addon could also help.

[ShivaS]

I did not installed flash and Adblock is running.
It might be an issue with the driver and the Xorg; I found similar problems reported for nouveau drivers where the fix was to install an experimental build of the video driver.
It's no fun having FF eating up half of the laptop's resuorces

[mzt]

I'm not a fan of raw installs on my fedora box (unless absolutely neccessary) nor can I do much about my builtin Radeon GPU in my notebook. So for now I'm stuck with what I have.

Thus can I ask, is there any update on whether RPMFusion will continue to host AMD Catalyst builds or if the package maintainer has given up as well, given that the last build was in Nov?

[Fenrin]

Originally Posted by mzt

[...]
Thus can I ask, is there any update on whether RPMFusion will continue to host AMD Catalyst builds or if the package maintainer has given up as well, given that the last build was in Nov?

new catalyst rpmfusion packages based on the 12.1 driver are in the testing repos.
rpmfusion testing x86_64

I don't have a updated Fedora 16 installation, otherwise I would test these new rpmfusion packages.