I have recently installed openSUSE 13.1. (clean install you could say, not an upgrade on top of the old version)
I am using a ASUS K53TK laptop with an AMD APU A6, with APU integrated graphics card and a dedicated HD 7670M 1GB. In the latest version of openSUSE (12.3) I was using the proprietary AMD drivers, because without them I can’t keep the CPU cool, and energy consumption at a reasonable level!
So when I went to install the AMD drivers (catalyst version 13.12), at the end of the installation I received a warning message saying something like: the installation completed with errors.
After restarting the laptop, the login screen was gone, instead I was presented with a console version of the log in screen, after entering my account info, I still wasn’t presented with kde, but with the console. I am guessing that X couldn’t start, but I actually do not know enough to see if that was what had happened.
So I did the only thing that I could do - uninstalled fglrx - and after reboot everything was back to normal.
I repeated the proccess after download a fresh copy of the “catalyst-13.12-linux-x86.x86_64.zip” archive, to make sure it wasn’t some sort of corruption, but the result is always the same!
I defenitly need to use this drivers as energy consumption is ridiculous without them.
Also, I have installed kernel-devel, since the installation required kernel-headers!
kernel 3.11 (which openSUSE 13.1 uses natively) saw the addition of DPM (dynamic power mgmt) to the radeon kernel driver, though this new feature was not enabled by default … to use it, evoke “radeon.dpm=1” on the kernel boot line (i.e. edit grub and add that) … DPM is quite good (equivalent to catalyst’s PM) … though you still face a second problem: the dGPU still being on all the time (see next point)
in the forthcoming kernel 3.13, DPM will be enabled by default (i.e. you will no longer need the kernel boot parameters for it to be turned on) … kernel 3.13 will also
bring about runtime PM for radeon powerexpess/hybrid graphics based hardware (i.e. the dGPU will be powered down when not in use, though you should still be able to utilise it when required via prime)
Your laptop’s ability to double as a thermonuclear reactor core, when using the OSS radeon driver stack, is coming to a close very soon lol!
kernel 3.11 (which openSUSE 13.1 uses natively) saw the addition of DPM (dynamic power mgmt) to the radeon kernel driver, though this new feature was not enabled by default … to use it, evoke “radeon.dpm=1” on the kernel boot line (i.e. edit grub and add that) … DPM is quite good (equivalent to catalyst’s PM) … though you still face a second problem: the dGPU still being on all the time (see next point)
in the forthcoming kernel 3.13, DPM will be enabled by default (i.e. you will no longer need the kernel boot parameters for it to be turned on) … kernel 3.13 will also
bring about runtime PM for radeon powerexpess/hybrid graphics based hardware (i.e. the dGPU will be powered down when not in use, though you should still be able to utilise it when required via prime) >
Your laptop’s ability to double as a thermonuclear reactor core, when using the OSS radeon driver stack, is coming to a close very soon lol!
I have tried the radeon.dpm=1 and it does seem to work well. Though I still appreciate the option to change between graphic adapters so I still went for the proprietary drivers.
Kernel 3.13 does sound promising lol!
But the easiest way to install the driver is using the 1-click install here: SDB:AMD fglrx - openSUSE
This will also give you updates automatically.
I did not knew about this!
Although this page SDB:AMD fglrx - openSUSE seems a bit out of date, since it warns about the Beta version “Catalyst 13.11 beta 9.4” being the only compatible with OpenSUSE 13.1, though this blog post says that the driver version 13.12 already supports version 13.1!
I leave here what I did to install version 13.12 of the drivers using the repositories
It’s true that the page is not 100% up-to-date anymore, but that driver has only been released about 2 weeks ago (or was it 3 weeks?).
OTOH, when you click on “Pending changes” on the bottom of the page, you’ll see that it already has been updated, the changes are just awaiting review to become published.
