Is it me or are the ATI catalyst drivers in the official repository incredibly stale?
I have catalyst 9.2 installed (the latest in the repo) but I’m pretty sure they’ve released 9.7 or 9.8
Now I really don’t want to uninstall the drivers and then reinstall them the hard way, but I guess that’s where I’m headed.
Any caveats with that?
incognito9 adjusted his/her AFDB on Friday 21 Aug 2009 15:46 to write:
>
> Is it me or are the ATI catalyst drivers in the official repository
> incredibly stale?
>
> I have catalyst 9.2 installed (the latest in the repo) but I’m pretty
> sure they’ve released 9.7 or 9.8
>
> Now I really don’t want to uninstall the drivers and then reinstall
> them the hard way, but I guess that’s where I’m headed.
>
> Any caveats with that?
>
>
What card have you got ?
–
Mark
Caveat emptor
Nullus in verba
Nil illegitimi carborundum
I always download the drivers from ATI/NVidia website and install them - the repo drivers tend to be lower performance. The downside is that you have to recompile/reinstall them whenever you do a kernel update!
I have a cheapie MSI R3450 radeon-based card with 11.1. I’ve always had trouble with video drivers - for instance, the non-laptop-specific NVidia drivers will actually work with laptops if you “mod” the .inf file. So video drivers seem to have a set of “problems” all their own.
I forgot to mention - with the NVidia drivers, after a kernel update, the boot process dumps you to a console logon because it “can’t find any screens” - you can logon there as root and run the installer and then reboot and all is well. With the ATI drivers, you will probably get dumped at a black-screen-of-death after a kernel update. You will need to reboot into “failsafe mode” in order to get a desktop and run the ATI driver installer, reboot, and all will be well.
lol!
PS: The emergency reboot is “Alt+SysReq” then individually, in order: R E I S U B (magic keys)
ok so I uninstalled the drivers from the repositories, and followed the directions under “ATI:the hard way”
It didn’t seem very hard when I read it over. However it also didn’t work.
I logged off, switched to a console login <ctl-alt-f1>, logged in as root, switched to init level 3, and ran the commands in the howto that generate a new xorg.conf and try out the driver with sax2.
My SaX2 log said “No Screens Found”.
Anyone else found this?
<Sigh>
Back to searching.
<Edit I have an HD 3200 embedded graphics in my motherboard, by the way>
as you have discovered, these newer drivers are a bit of a problem… which is probably why the repo doesn’t have the latest versions.
in my opinion, the 9.2 to 9.6 drivers were not worth the effort since they were not very stable (at least for me), but… the recent 9.8 driver is much better and i encourage you to give it a try (as i am doing, with both fingers crossed).
if you managed to build a rpm and install it, then ran aticonfig, followed by sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx… it will break. To me it seems that the modifications that aticonfig makes to the xorg.conf file describing the monitor arrangement are not compatible with sax2 and it hangs. if you had not run sax2, and rebooted after aticonfig --initial, it would have worked fine (until you tried to run sax2 from yast, it won’t work…refuses to write to the xorg.conf file).
if you had a copy of your xorg.conf file from before upgrading somewhere to replace the current mangled one, this could be easy… copy to /etc/X11 and overwrite it… then run aticonfig --initial again from init 3.
if you don’t have a copy, then it will be more involved, you will have to manually edit xorg.conf if you have the knowledge of what you need in there. Or you can do plan b…
revert to the radeon (or radeonhd) driver which should be installed and present on your machine.
rpm -e $(rpm -qa ‘fglrx’) – remove all fglrx
then,
sax2 -r -m 0=radeon --to install radeon driver
reboot, set up your machine for desired resolution and fontsize (at least mine changes everytime) and mouse settings.
After you think you have it the way you want it, then make a copy of your xorg.conf file just in case and install your fglrx rpm as you did before, then just run aticonfig without the sax2 setup.
It works this way, although you are unable to use sax2 after this… you must use amdcccle to change display properties.
Hopefully this situation will be addressed soon, seems everyone is aware of it… if you look in the release notes/install pdf files from ATI, they specifically mention this problem.
good luck.
Wow. I did, in fact, build an rpm and install it, and I did run aticonfig followed by sax2, and it did, in fact, break. Should have talked to you earlier 
What I did was, from init 3, uninstall the rpm from yast and reinstall the 9.2 drivers from the repository. Then I ran sax2 and everything worked. Except, of course, that I was using the older drivers that I started out with. I guess I should have figured that they would have been in the repo if they were better, but you know I expected some mention of installation problems on Phoronix or something.
To me it seems that the modifications that aticonfig makes to the xorg.conf file describing the monitor arrangement are not compatible with sax2 and it hangs. if you had not run sax2, and rebooted after aticonfig --initial, it would have worked fine (until you tried to run sax2 from yast, it won’t work…refuses to write to the xorg.conf file).
if you had a copy of your xorg.conf file from before upgrading somewhere to replace the current mangled one, this could be easy… copy to /etc/X11 and overwrite it… then run aticonfig --initial again from init 3.
if you don’t have a copy, then it will be more involved, you will have to manually edit xorg.conf if you have the knowledge of what you need in there. Or you can do plan b…
revert to the radeon (or radeonhd) driver which should be installed and present on your machine.
rpm -e $(rpm -qa ‘fglrx’) – remove all fglrx
then,
sax2 -r -m 0=radeon --to install radeon driver
reboot, set up your machine for desired resolution and fontsize (at least mine changes everytime) and mouse settings.
After you think you have it the way you want it, then make a copy of your xorg.conf file just in case and install your fglrx rpm as you did before, then just run aticonfig without the sax2 setup.
It works this way, although you are unable to use sax2 after this… you must use amdcccle to change display properties.
Hopefully this situation will be addressed soon, seems everyone is aware of it… if you look in the release notes/install pdf files from ATI, they specifically mention this problem.
good luck.
Since I’ve reinstalled the drivers, my xorg.conf should be fine.
I’ll try again with
aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf
from init 3 after I install the rpm and no sax2 ever after that.
Wish me luck.
If this works, maybe we should try to get the ATI howto updated to reflect these problems?
edit:forgot a /quote
yes, this is not an elegant solution, hopefully the “powers that be” will make the proper adjustments to sax2 and make life easier.
i haven’t tried the reverse of this, just using sax2 without aticonfig… but i suspect it would work. one of these days i might try it. 
on a different note, i have a HD3850 on one box and had been stuck using Catalyst 8.1X drivers which were gradually obsoleting themselves due to kernel upgrades. none of the 9.X drivers were stable until 9.8 (hopefully). So far it’s been much better, hope you have the same experience.
Hmm… sometimes I scratch my head over why I get lucky with these installs and everyone else has problems.
I had 9.7 ATI driver on our Dell Studio-1537 laptop (with a radeon HD3450) and the 2.6.27.25 kernel, and when the new 2.6.27.29 kernel came out, I decided to use that opportunity to update to the 9.8 ATI driver. I downloaded that driver to my laptop’s hard drive.
So I then rebooted to run level 3 (I can never be bothered with the init-3 stuff) and I backed up the Dell’s /etc/X11/xorg.conf (sort of common sense). I then did an rpm search for any rpms with “fglrx” in them, found one, and I removed it.
I then built the driver “the hardway” mostly using the advice here: ATI/The Hard Way - openSUSE except its not so hard … ie I ran " sh ati*.run --listpkg " and then ran " sh ati*.run --buildpkg SuSE/SUSE111-IA32 " for my 32-bit openSUSE-11.1. That created an rpm that I then installed.
Then while I noted the instructions say to run “sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx” I stopped and thought for a second. The old xorg.conf worked for me. What is likely to change with an updated driver, since I had the previous 9.7 version of the proprietary driver running ? I was curious to find out. So I skipped the "sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx " step, and simply typed ‘exit’ to get rid of root permissions, and typed ‘startx’, and it just worked with a nice boot to KDE-3.5.10.
So I am scratching my head now. It was easy. Incredibly so. What did I do wrong to skip the hard stuff ? Or was I just lucky?
oldcpu thanks for that note, it seems to confirm my suspicion that you could run either to set up the new driver… but not both… and you are committed to using amdcccle (if you used aticonfig) or sax2 (if you used sax2 for setup) for changes.
Since aticonfig saves old backups of xorg.conf i can tell you the differences are:
Sax2 compliant modifications by aticonfig in older drivers
Section “ServerLayout”
Screen “Screen[0]”
Section “Monitor”
Identifier "Monitor[0]
Section “Device”
Identifier “Device[0]”
Section “Screen”
Device “Device[0]”
Identifier “Screen[0]”
Monitor “Monitor[0]”
New driver xorg.conf modifications:
Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Layout[all]”
Screen 0 “aticonfig-Screen[0]-0” 0 0
Section “Monitor”
Identifier “aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0”
Section “Device”
Identifier “aticonfig-Device[0]-0”
Section “Screen”
Identifier “aticonfig-Screen[0]-0”
Device “aticonfig-Device[0]-0”
Monitor “aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0”
my first thought now is that just using a sax2 command would be the most beneficial, contrary to my advice to incognito… because the new aticonfig modifications makes sax2 unusable. Sure you can change resolutions with amdcccle, but you can’t change your mouse setup, etc.
The proper solution is for sax2 to recognize either method imo.
btw, your experience keeps you from stumbling into obstacles that baffle the rest of us.
See… when I don’t run sax2 after installing the 9.8 rpm that I created, I get X with framebuffer graphics. when I run sax2 I get errors.
I’ll keep plodding around. Fortunately I can always seem to get back to the (mostly) working 9.2 drivers.
Perplexing.
What version did you have before 9.8 ?
I had the ATI 9.7 … and I was skeptical that anything in the configuration file had changed from 9.7 to 9.8.
On the other hand, 9.2 to 9.8 is a bit larger jump.
The version in the repositories is 9.2, and that’s what I’ve been using.
None of the ideas thrown around on this thread has worked for me. Maybe my kernel is too old? I’m still running OS 11.0 with kernel 2.6.25.20-0.5-default x86_64
I’m thinking I’ll wait until the next release comes out, upgrade, and try installing the drivers then.
It could be. The kernel for openSUSE-11.1 now is 2.6.27.29-0.1. and the original kernel 11.1 came with was 2.6.27.9. Typically for most drivers (I don’t know about graphics drivers as I build my own when using proprietary) in the repos support the first (2.6.27.9) and the latest (currently 2.6.27.29) and not those in between (ie NOT 2.6.25.20).
IMHO you may be looking at updating “the hardway”, which is not so hard. Assuming one has the kernel source/syms & basic build environment already in place, simply preposition the ATI .run file in an easy to reach directory from run level-3, remove the “fglrx” app, and follow the remainder of the guidance here: ATI/The Hard Way - openSUSE
Thats a PITA the 1st few times, but once one gets the technique down, its pretty much a walk in the park, as there steps then make sense and are not so foreign.
From the ATI web page:
The drivers above support English only.
The display driver requires POSIX shared memory to be enabled on the system.
Kernal Sources package is no longer required if Kernel Header package is installed.
32-Bit packages must be installed for 64-Bit Linux drivers to install or work.
What exactly do you think they mean bt, 32-bit packages must be installed?
32-bit kernel header packages?
Ok. Just tried to install the recently released catalyst 9.9 drivers.
I uninstalled the fglrx package, and the kernel headers that went with it. Ran the Downloaded ATI program to create an RPM for OS 11.0, and logged out. I logged in on a separate root console (ctl-alt-f1) and switched to run level 3 (init 3). I installed the RPM (using a plain old rpm -i command), ran aticonfig --initial (as suggested) and then went back to run level 5 (init 5).
Strangely enough, this worked.
The entire process took about three or four minutes.