After fglrx installation, desktop environment runs only for root and not user

English Hardware
1

Hello all,

Problem description:

  1. Installed fglrx. I’ve tried both, installing the drivers from the AMD ATI website and when that didn’t work I tried the drivers available from opensuse ati repository via YAST2 (http://geeko.ioda.net/mirror/amd-fglrx/openSUSE_13.2/).
  2. The installation (using either drivers) completes successfully.
  3. I reboot the system and I am taken directly to console instead of the login page. Checking the /var/log/Xorg.6.log has no errors (EE) and the following warnings(WW):
    > more /var/log/Xorg.6.log | grep WW
    (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
    603.728] (WW) The directory “/usr/share/fonts/misc/sgi” does not exist.
    603.993] (WW) Falling back to old probe method for fglrx
    604.200] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:17:0) found
    604.200] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:18:0) found
    604.200] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:18:1) found
    604.200] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:18:2) found
    604.200] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:19:0) found
    604.201] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:19:1) found
    604.201] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:19:2) found
    604.201] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:0) found
    604.201] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:1) found
    604.201] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:2) found
    604.201] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:3) found
    604.201] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:4) found
    604.201] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:5) found
    604.201] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@1:0:1) found
    604.240] (WW) fglrx(0): board is an unknown third party board, chipset is supported
    604.634] (WW) fglrx(0): Option “VendorName” is not used
    604.634] (WW) fglrx(0): Option “ModelName” is not used

Steps I’ve taken to resolve the problem:

  1. I ran /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh to uninstall everything. The system reverts back to the radeon drivers and works fine as expect. i.e. After boot, I am presented with the login screen where I can login as a user and proceed to gnome.
  2. With the fglrx drivers installed, I tried booting with option “nomodeset” -> same problem
  3. With the fglrx drivers installed, I can login as root and “startx”. I get the desktop environment working perfectly. Running fglrxinfo shows the anticipated result:
    display: :6 screen: 0
    OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
    OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon HD 5800 Series
    OpenGL version string: 4.4.13283 Compatibility Profile Context 14.501.1003
  4. With the fglrx drivers installed, from the console I logged in as user and “sudo init 5”. It seems that the graphical interface is starting up although it takes hours to slowly appear. I get the green openSUSE background with nothing else appearing. In this case the file /home/user/.local/xorg/Xorg.6.log has an error (EE) xf86OpenConsole: Cannot open /dev/tty0 (No such file or directory). I added the user to the tty group but still that did not fix the problem.
  5. With the fglrx drivers installed, I added the user to the groups video, tty, but did not fix the problem.

System:
I am using openSUSE 13.2 on a 64 bit system. I have installed the 64 bit fglrx drivers. I have an ATI Radeon HD5850 graphics card.

I would greatly appreciate it if anyone has an insight as to what might be causing the problem with fglrx and xorg. Although I can use the system with the radeon drivers, I really want to use the ATI drivers for GPU programming instead.

Thank you for your time.

C.

2

Did you uninstall the driver completely before installing it the other way?

  1. I ran /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh to uninstall everything. The system reverts back to the radeon drivers and works fine as expect. i.e. After boot, I am presented with the login screen where I can login as a user and proceed to gnome.

If you installed the driver via the RPM packages, you should not run fglrx-uninstall.sh. Just deinstall the packages again via YaST or zypper.

To your original problem:
As you are using GNOME, you’d probably using GDM as display manager too I suppose. But the current GDM version (in 13.2 at least) doesn’t work with the current fglrx version. So try using another displaymanager instead, xdm should be installed by default (change the DISPLAYMANAGER=xxx setting in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager), lightdm might be a (better) alternative you could install.
GNOME itself should work fine, but it might crash in certain cases.

You could also install the latest beta driver via Sebastian Siebert’s makerpm-amd-15.3-beta.sh script, that also offers to install a workaround for GDM:
https://www.sebastian-siebert.de/2015/04/08/opensuse-proprietaeren-grafik-treiber-amd-catalyst-15-3-beta-als-rpm-installieren/
Please ask if you need help with this, as that page is in german…

3

Dear wolfi323,

Thank you very much. Indeed, changing the displaymanager (lightdm in my case) resolved the problem.

Just for closure:

  • when I installed the drivers via the AMD ATI script I downloaded from their website, I then uninstalled by running the /usr/share/ati/fglrx_uninstall.sh script
  • when I installed the drivers from the opensuse repository via YAST, I then uninstalled again via YAST.

Current solution:

  • I have installed the drivers from the opensuse repository and changed my display manager to something other than gdm (lightdm in my case) as per wolfi323’s suggestion. Everything works great.

Many thanks.

C.