Fedora 16 Installation Guide

Two Driver Choices

The Free Software radeon driver is making real progress in F16's kernel 3.1 and 3.2, it's expected to get even better in kernel 3.3 and 3.4.

The kernel 3.1 driver will easily run desktop compositing (eg: gnome-shell, transparent terminal). It even manages 60fps VSync at 1920x1200 in many 3D games (eg: Darkplaces Quake engine) with no problems. Depending on your CPU, constant 45fps in 1080p Minecraft is easily doable.

It is true that the AMD-supplied driver is the only real choice for running newer games, such as most things you'd buy through Steam, however the Free driver is more than capable for everyday desktop needs such as compositing and most native Linux games. Please research and test your requirements, and consider using the Free Software radeon driver before installing ATI's non-Free proprietary flgrx driver.

Pre-built packages from RPMFusion

RECOMMENDED METHOD

This is easier than manually building the driver from AMD as you don't need to worry about passing kernel options via GRUB2, configuring DKMS, rebuilding the kernel module every time you do a kernel upgrade, or cleaning up any mess if you want to remove the driver.

Clean up previous AMD-supplied driver installation

If you're coming from the AMD-supplied driver to RPMFusion's driver, you'll need to reinstall this package as the AMD driver installation changes files it contains.

su -
yum reinstall mesa-libGL

Setup RPMFusion

There are instructions on http://www.rpmfusion.org/ but this should do it.

su -
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm  http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Install Catalyst driver packages

This procedure is the same for 32-bit and 64-bit, yum will automatically install the correct driver and libs for your architecture.

su -
yum install akmod-catalyst xorg-x11-drv-catalyst xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-libs

32-bit Libraries on 64-bit OS

If you want to play 32-bit games on a 64-bit Fedora installation, you will need to install the 32-bit libraries in addition to the above step.

su -
yum install xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-libs.i686

Kernel module packages

Note that there are individual kmod-catalyst- packages which supply kernel modules for specific Fedora kernel versions. If you are using these and you upgrade the kernel without upgrading the kmod-catalyst- package, loading the proprietary driver will fail and you'll revert back to the free radeon graphics driver. Sometimes there is a day or so between Fedora upgrading their kernel and RPMFusion building a new kmod package.

The akmod-catalyst package we installed above automatically builds a new kernel module at boot-time when the kernel is upgraded, so you never have to worry about this.

Official AMD Driver

Requirements

At F16's release, the ATI driver did not support the version of X.Org that Fedora shipped with. This has been resolved in Catalyst 11.11 onwards. You will need version 11.11 of the ATI driver or later for F16, earlier versions will not work.

Preinstall required packages

The script from AMD builds a kernel module which loads AMD's proprietary binary blob, so we're going to install some development packages.

su -
yum install kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc gcc-c++

If you're on 64-bit you may also have to install this package too. (you need this for 64-bit nVidia drivers so I had it installed anyway, could someone please confirm/deny this requirement?)

su -c
yum install glibc-devel

Download driver

Download the appropriate driver from http://support.amd.com/

It will be called something like ati-driver-installer-version.run.

Install driver

Run the file as root in the sh shell.

su -
chmod +x ati-driver-installer-version.run
sh ./ati-driver-installer-version.run

Select the default install, do not generate distribution packages.

Confirming Installation

Check the build install log.

tail /usr/share/ati/fglrx-install.log

You should see data confirming the module build worked.

build succeeded with return value 0
duplicating results into driver repository...
done.

Generate a new xorg.conf

This should do fine for most people.

su -
aticonfig --initial -f

If you have multiple monitors or X2 cards then you'll need to do some other stuff. Try man aticonfig, read the Catalyst documentation, or check one of the Ubuntu guides for the correct syntax.

Uninstalling AMD-supplied driver

Run AMD's uninstall script.

su -
sh /usr/share/ati/amd-uninstall.sh

Reinstall this package as the AMD driver installation changes files it contains.

su -
yum reinstall mesa-libGL

Troubleshooting

In the event you install the driver and are greeted with a blank screen or corrupted video signal when starting X, you are able to manually disable the Free Software radeon driver to troubleshoot.

Turn your system off and on again. On the GRUB boot screen, press e to edit the default boot entry, scroll down to the kernel line (which begins linux), then press e again to edit the line.

Add the entries radeon.modeset=0 blacklist=radeon to the end. For example, if your kernel line is

linux /vmlinuz-3.2.9-1.fc16.x86_64 LANG=en_US.UTF-8

we'll want to edit it so it is

linux /vmlinuz-3.2.9-1.fc16.x86_64 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 radeon.modeset=0 blacklist=radeon

These entries do the following:

• radeon.modeset=0 disables "Kernel Mode Settting" for the Free Software driver (ie: the driver telling the kernel to setup the screen resolution, instead of XOrg doing it)
• blacklist=radeon stops the kernel from loading the Free Software radeon driver altogether

From here you can manually remove and reinstall the proprietary drivers, either with yum or with PackageKit's Add/Remove Software application, as desired.