Opensuse 11.3, ATI proprietary driver(10.8), Postprocessing Kernel Module

English Hardware
1

Hi, everyone, I am new to this forum, I wish I didn’t violate any forum rules by posting this. I also searched this sub-forum but no topic were dedicated to the problem that I encountered, so I start this new thread:

I installed Opensuse 11.3 recently. I had Opensuse 11.2 before, but this was a fresh installation of 11.3. While I tried to install the ATI proprietary driver downloaded from AMD website (I tried both 10.7 and 10.8), I got stocked in the “postprocdssing kernel module” step. The installation just hang there, like forever, no error message, no information, no further instruction. I have to click the “cancel” button, but then the whole installation just being aborted. It was back to the starting point.

I tried to repackage the driver into rpm for Opensuse using AMD’s driver option and install it by “zypper install”, but the installation was stocked at 92% and never went further, no error message, no information, …,etc. ( I guess it was stocked at “postprocessing kernel model” as well.)

I used to have no problem installing the ATI proprietary driver in Opensue 11.2. However, I had severe screen tearing effect when watching HD video (in ts, tp, m2ts, mkv format) and also videos run by flash player. In Opensuse 11.3 with vanilla driver, the tearing effect is gone, which is a major improvement over Opensuse 11.2.
But, oh but, the fan of the video card keeps running at full speed, creating huge amount of noise (and drives people crazy in 5 minutes like I am now…aww!!!) That’s the very reason why I want to install the proprietary driver and endure the screen tearing effect: the fan will no longer running at full speed and become much quieter.

Please, anyone who can help me out of this is very much appreciated. Thank you.

Here are my hardware information:
Graphic card: MSI Radeon HD 4870 X2 OC Edition (R4870X2-T2D2G-OC)
CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-920 Processor
Motherboard:Asus P6TD Deluxe
Ram: OCZ 6GB DDR3 1600

Here is some information of my Opensuse 11.3 system before installing the ATI driver:
rpm -qa ‘kernel’:
kernel-desktop-devel-2.6.34-12.3.x86_64
kernel-default-devel-2.6.34-12.3.x86_64
kernel-devel-2.6.34-12.3.noarch
kernel-syms-2.6.34-12.3.x86_64
kernel-desktop-2.6.34-12.3.x86_64
patterns-openSUSE-devel_kernel-11.3-22.1.x86_64
kernel-source-2.6.34-12.3.noarch
kernel-xen-devel-2.6.34-12.3.x86_64
kernel-firmware-20100617-2.2.noarch

rpm -qa ‘Mesa’:
Mesa-7.8.2-1.3.x86_64
Mesa-32bit-7.8.2-1.3.x86_64
Mesa-devel-7.8.2-1.3.x86_64

rpm -qa ‘driver’:
xorg-x11-driver-video-nouveau-0.0.15_20100401_bfb95cc-1.10.x86_64
cups-drivers-1.3.9-11.1.x86_64
xorg-x11-driver-video-radeonhd-1.3.0_20100325_f6c9991-1.13.x86_64
xorg-x11-driver-video-32bit-7.5-15.2.x86_64
xorg-x11-driver-video-intel-legacy-2.9.1-1.9.x86_64
virtuoso-drivers-6.1.1-1.23.x86_64
xorg-x11-driver-video-7.5-15.2.x86_64
OpenOffice_org-base-drivers-mysql-3.2.1.4-1.5.x86_64
xorg-x11-driver-input-7.5-8.4.x86_64

uname -a:
Linux Umbriel 2.6.34-12-desktop #1 SMP PREEMPT 2010-06-29 02:39:08 +0200 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

2

To my very inexperienced eyes it looks like you have allot of kernels, don’t know if you need all of them. If I were you I would start by paring down the number of installed kernels you have.

good luck.

3

The docs on the ATI site are pretty explicit about the packages you need and about the 32bit environment you need to compile the module. So taking a closer look into those docs and making sure that the required 32bit packages are installed is always a good way to start.

In addition you have /usr/share/ati folder with most likely a install log which might provide aditional information… or you can force extended output to the terminal with ‘-x’ if not wrong. So you know exactly what is being done.

4

@IcarianHeights: Thank you for your reply. I tried to uninstall all the kernel module listed above, except for one:
kernel-desktop-2.6.34-12.3.x86_64
one by one, uninstall, reboot, and install the ATI driver, but never succeeded, even there’s only “kernel-desktop-2.6.34-12.3.x86_64” left in the system.

@ketheriel: Thank you for the reply. I am sorry I didn’t make it clear. I have a 64 bit OpenSuse 11.3 and I tried to install 64 bit version of the ATI driver. Does it have anything to do with the 32 bit environment? If so, what’s the steps that I need to take? Thank you.

5

I cannot edit the previous post to add the following contents so I have to double post. Sorry about that:

I did a couple of fresh installations of Opensuse 11.3 this afternoon, all default settings. I did configure the sound card, which is the creative x-fi elite pro and the printer, HP color laser jet cm1015 mfp, during the installation. I still couldn’t get the ATI driver installed. There’s only one time that I didn’t configure the sound card and printer and then the ATI driver installed!!! That’s so so weird. And the weirdest thing is that I couldn’t log in the KDE session anymore after reboot, it kept jumping back to the log-in screen.