2 days ago my Opensuse 12.1 KDE system crashed after an update. An update to the fglrx system caused the crash. I was unable to login to Xorg.
Was only able to see the terminal at startup.
I had to reinstall the system as I had to get some work done and did not have time to get it fixed.
Now I have installed the OS all over again. Upon reading the documentation for installing ATI drivers I came across the Preamble
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Preamble Before trying to install the fglrx package disable free radeon driver.
On the boot line add : radeon.modeset=0 blacklist=radeon 3
You will boot without xorg launched.
Recreate an initrd without the radeon loaded. Simply launch as root mkinitrd when it is done then proceed with one of the two method GUI or command line.
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Now I am not an advanced user. Can someone kindly explain this in layman terms and what I need to do exactly.
I tried this. Installed the atiupgrade, ran it, it detected that th kernel source and some other stuff was not of the same version, updated it and installed Catalyst.
I thought this fixed the issue, but it hadnt. I opened the Catalyst control centre and it said that there is no driver installed for my graphics card.
I re-installed opensuse 12.1 again from scratch and ran the atiupgrade. It again did the same thing and resulted in no drivers installed(as indicated by Catalyst).
How do I successfully remove the opensource driver and install the proprietary fglrx drivers?
The problem is that the latest Catalyst driver (12.6) doesn’t support the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series anymore. It’s a quite new issue and I’m working on it. See this thread: http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/hardware/476554-dont-update-ati-proprietary-driver-radeon-hd-4000-radeon-hd-3000-radeon-hd-2000-a.html. If you happen to have such a model, you can either pass “12.4” as argument to atiupgrade, so it will install Catalyst 12.4 (which works fine) or you can use the new version of the script available here: http://www.unixversal.com/linux/openSUSE/atiupgrade, which can install the Catalyst 12.6 legacy driver. Be aware that this driver is in a beta state and will display a watermark “Testing use only” on your desktop. Once this script has been tested with both legacy and newer models of ATI cards, I will release the new version in my repo.
One more thing: you should delete the files in /usr/share/atiupgrade before running atiupgrade in case you built the non legacy 12.6 driver in a previous attempt. Otherwise atiupgrade might try to install this driver again (since it has a higher version number than the legacy 12.6 beta driver.)