ATI Radeon Drivers, Implementing ATI

After some frustration to find ATI drivers, I went directly to their website and found a file that starts ati... and ends with run as ati.*.run
Downloaded it to root, and ran it. It installed the appropriate fgrlx file for SL6.1 version 6. kernel.

The inital SL6.1 linux did not support my ATI Radeon card. I therefore downloaded a ati*.run file from the ATI website, it worked perfectly to allow the graphics card to work the kernal (6.x). With the kernel upgrade this week, graphics was again broken, redoing the ati*.run installation with a --force parameter or a --install parameter followed by a reboot resolved the problem.

Rerunning the ati*run without parameters will not resolve the problem My system is now back in operation with full gui.
One request from users in this forum. When I switch to virtual terminal (ctl-alt-f2 to f7) the text is very large, and the terminal has very wide margins. The terminal appears stuck at about 80 x 24 lines.

What X11 parameters may I use to get 1600x200 resolution or at least 132 chars wide by may more lines deep.

Regards

Leslie Satenstein

I have found that the easiest way to deal with ATI driver upgrades and kernel is this.

Everything is done as root.

Install the new kernel.
Reboot.
Go to
/usr/share/ati
run
./amd-uninstall.sh --force
or if you have the ATI drivers below 11.8
./fglrx-uninstall.sh --force

For the ATI drivers, I prefer to build an rpm distribution specific package to install
./ati-driver-installer-11-8-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg RedHat/RHEL6_64a
for 64 bit or
./ati-driver-installer-11-8-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg RedHat/RHEL6
for 32 bit
The installer creates the rpm file and you install it as root. For example:
rpm -Uhv fglrx64_p_i_c-8.881-1.x86_64.rpm
To setup the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, do
amdconfig --initial
for drivers 11.8 or higher or
aticonfig --initial
for drivers 11.7 or lower

Good info RalphEllis, thanks for posting

You know, I just did this today... Created an RPM, then installed it.

I wonder if the RPM stays between kernel updates...

My setup was because the stock ATI drivers don't support 3 x screens on a HD6870....

My experience has been that if you upgrade the kernel but do not rebuild the ATI drivers then X will still work but you may not have desktop effects or 3D acceleration. If you cannot boot into a graphical interface at all, you can rename the
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
file to something else and your system will boot up with the stock ATI open source driver.
Uninstalling and reinstalling the ATI/AMD drivers is pretty simple. Sometimes you have to use the --force option but most times the installer cooperates.
The quality of the ATI drivers has greatly improved over time and they explicitly support RHEL and consequently support Scientific Linux and Centos very well.

Any reason not to use ELRepo? It's a small repository that basically just has hardware drivers (for example rt2860-firmware + kmod-rt5390sta packages got the wireless on my HP DM1z working!). AMD drivers are currently at 11.7.

Just asking since that's what I'm using, and I want to know if there's something wrong with it

I have been using ELRepo for the same reason as you mention: packages for specific hardware (like enabling LPT printing on EL6).
If you should enable the repo through yum, that is something you need to consider carefully.

You can use the repositories successfully.
I have had better performance with the drivers from the ATI/AMD site especially when I either did a custom install or build a distribution specific package. I find that even using the installer in "Automatic" mode produces a less satisfactory result in terms of either Desktop Effects or using the graphics card to do scientific calculations in BOINC projects.

Late to the party, I know, but the need for Radeon drivers on SL6 is likely to increase as time goes on anyway, so...

I gave a description of how to get SL6 to play nice with an AMD E350 board in this post. This process is a bit more complete than most solutions I find through search engines, and also covers the "why doesn't the 'no screen tearing' button work?!?" issue.