fglrx borked my Fedora 11 installation

[midol]

Hello all,

I recently installed a new hard drive and a Sapphire Radeon 4770 video cartd into my Opteron box. I updated F11 to be current as of yesterday then today installed the proprietary driver from ATI. The unit goes through the boot process fine up to the point where I would ordinarily log in. Then I get a squinched up band of video across the top half inch of the screen and there I sit (broken hearted as the old doggerel says.)

I have booted from the original install CD and tried several times to use the Linux Rescue startup. I discovered that there is no xorg.conf by default but managed to create an empty one and then the aticonfig --initial command overwrote it with something that looks plausible to my inexpert eye but I still can not get a usable graphic session. I could reinstall and get a working system with the default vesa driver but until the open driver now under development is in better shape I'd like to be able to use the ATI blob.

Suggestions? debugging info I can provide?

Dave

[TrentZ]

Hi,

F11 comes with kernel 2.6.29, and Catalyst doesn't support it yet. When Xorg loads, it uses fglrx as the DDX driver, but since it needs the kernel module to work, it doesn't. You have to patch KCL to make it work and still doesn't work right (it will hang Xserver very frequently).

The best you can do is revert to the OSS driver that comes with Fedora (radeon) and wait 'tll tomorrow, when AMD is expected to release 9.7 and then try to patch it.

To remove the fglrx: boot, select your kernel in GRUB and hit 'e', add "runlevel 3" at the end of the line that loads the kernel. Login as root and run the uninstaller: /etc/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh. Reboot.

If you still want to patch the kernel module, take a look at the Arch Linux PKGBUILD for Catalyst.

[midol]

Thanks a lot! this is just what I need. Can I ask you please to help me specify radeon as the OS driver? Do I set this in the device stanza on xorg.conf?

Dave

[TrentZ]

Just delete xorg.conf and let Xorg use radeon automagically.

[bridgman]

run the fglrx uninstaller first though; it overwrites some files during install

[midol]

Hi,

F11 comes with kernel 2.6.29, and Catalyst doesn't support it yet. When Xorg loads, it uses fglrx as the DDX driver, but since it needs the kernel module to work, it doesn't. You have to patch KCL to make it work and still doesn't work right (it will hang Xserver very frequently).

The best you can do is revert to the OSS driver that comes with Fedora (radeon) and wait 'tll tomorrow, when AMD is expected to release 9.7 and then try to patch it.

To remove the fglrx: boot, select your kernel in GRUB and hit 'e', add "runlevel 3" at the end of the line that loads the kernel. Login as root and run the uninstaller: /etc/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh. Reboot.

If you still want to patch the kernel module, take a look at the Arch Linux PKGBUILD for Catalyst.

Note that on my F11 installation the top level directory was /usr rather than /etc, i.e., /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh

worked fine.

d