Warning to users of Catalyst 8.11

[Zhick]

I can only agree with RealNC on this, 8.11 fucked up my system baaadly. I've got pretty much the same setup (Gentoo x86_64, Kernel 2.6.27,X Server 1.5.3), but I've experienced different problems:
When using fglrx things were mostly okay, but radeon stopped working completely. I couldn't even startx with radeon anymorge (drm and radeon modules loaded, fglrx unloaded, symlinks setup correctly, and correct xorg.conf. Still X simply wouldn't start). Now that I unmerged ati-drivers, X atleast starts again, but everythings just awkward... (don't know how to describe more precisely... well, system is sluggish, and e.g. my taskbar symbols are messed up. and compositing isn't working anymore).
I'm now reemerging radeon, mesa, my drm-modules etc and hope this will fix things.
So yeah I'd suggest everyone to be really carefully with Catalyst 8.11 on Gentoo. I guess the ebuild is bugged...

[dscharrer]

Zhick, I think your problems are caused by the Gentoo ati-drivers ebuild, not the Catalyst driver. See http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=246672#c47. If I'm right, re-emerging xorg-server should fix your problems, at least as long as you don't reinstall ati-drivers-8.552-r2.

[energyman]

you probably installed the wrong ebuild - composite broken is a sign of mismatch and missing fglrx libglx.
emerge -C ati-drivers && emerge "=ati-drivers-8.552-r2"

[Zhick]

Nope, 8.552-r2 was definitly the version I installed.
And I'm not gonna touch that driver again until I've fixed my precious radeon setup... reemerging mesa, radeon, drm and libdrm didn't fix it... I'm using vesa right now. I'm gonna emerge -e @system && emerge -e @world now : /.

[energyman]

instead of senseless re-emerging, you should check which packet installs which files and compare that. Well done it only takes a minute or two and always leads to meaningfull results. If somewhere is a stale libglx or something like that, emerging stuff won't help you.

And in the future: stay away from unstable stuff, if you can't cope with the problems.

[dscharrer]

Nope, 8.552-r2 was definitly the version I installed.
And I'm not gonna touch that driver again until I've fixed my precious radeon setup... reemerging mesa, radeon, drm and libdrm didn't fix it... I'm using vesa right now. I'm gonna emerge -e @system && emerge -e @world now : /.

Try re-emerging xorg-server first. See the link in my last comment.

[Zhick]

Try re-emerging xorg-server first. See the link in my last comment.

Sorry, I had overread your first post. :<
What you say sounds very much like it could be my problem, I'll try it out immediately.
Edit: Yep, that was it, thanks alot.

And in the future: stay away from unstable stuff, if you can't cope with the problems.

Hey, I'm not complaining, I had just made bad experiences with the ebuild and thought I'd let others know.

[RealNC]

I did the only thing that is more or less guaranteed to tell me if it's my setup that's broken. I installed openSUSE 11 on a partition and then Catalyst 8.11. I let it compile the whole generic kernel (huge; it builds two tons of modules). Twice. No crashes.

I guess that tells me it's not the hardware but something in my Gentoo setup is causing this. That's a bit of a let-down for me since I thought I had a "clean" system (because I know my way around Gentoo.) I probably will revert all packages back to stable ones (I have a few from the "testing branch", "~arch" in other words), revert to default options in my /etc/make.conf and do a full system/world emerge.