Fedora 17 Installation Guide

amd catalyst 12.6 beta can work well with fedora 17. http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst126beta.aspx

Steps to install:

Prereqs:

1. You need kernel 3.3.7-1 or 3.3.7-3 . Get them from: (Download kernel, kernel-devel and kernel-headers)

    Kernel 3.3.7-3: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=321331
    Kernel 3.3.7-1: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=319972

2. Amd Catalyst 12.6 beta

    Amd Catlyst: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst126beta.aspx

Procedure:

Even if you have kernel 3.4.0-1 or higher, this procedure will work! So dont panic! I will take kernel 3.3.7-3 as example, you can use 7-1.

1. Install the kernel: sudo yum --nogpgcheck install kernel-3.3.7-2.fc17.x86_64.rpm (nogpgcheck is needed sice koji packages are not signed)

2. Remove existing kernel-devel: First do: rpm -qa | grep kernel-devel . Then remove the kernel-devel-3.x.x package you see, by using yum erase kernel-devel-3.4.0-1.fc17.x86_64 (or whatever package you are using)

3. Install kernel-devel sudo yum --nogpgcheck install kernel-3.3.7-2.fc17.x86_64.rpm

4. Now, you need to remove kernel-headers. You need to use rpm, sice yum wont uninstall it because of dependancies. Use: rpm -evv -nodeps kernel-headers-3.4.0.1.fc17.x86_64 (or your kernel headers version, check with rpm -qa | grep kernel-headers)

5. Reboot to kernel 3.3.7-3 and install AMD-ATI Catalyst 12.6 BETA driver.

6. now edit yum.conf and exclude kernel updates. do: sudo nano /etc/yum.conf and add this to the end: "exclude=kernel*" This will prevent kernel from upgrading. When a new version of Catalyst is available, check for the kernel it supports and upgrde your kernel by uncommenting this line.

Installing on Older Cards (HD4xxx and below)

If you have an HD4xxx series card, Catalyst 12.4 is the newest driver to support it (as of June 4, 2012). This won't work with X version 1.12 (the one packaged with Fedora 17). To downgrade to X version 1.11, use the following commands (as root).
Note: I'm assuming x86_64
IMPORTANT: I'd highly recommend going down to runlevel 3 first. You can do this using the following command in one of the text consoles (<CTRL> + <ALT> + <Fx> where x is 1-9, just try them until you get to a console)

systemctl isolate runlevel3.target

Commands for downgrading X:

yum erase xorg-x11-drv-intel

yum --releasever=16 install libxcb* xcb-util startup-notification*

yum --releasever=16 downgrade *xcb* xorg*

You may also need libxcb.i686 from the Fedora 16 release. The intel driver has additional dependencies, and those with AMD/ATi cards don't need it anyway.

To solve the issues with the new kernel source, use the steps in

• Fedora 16 Installation Guide

UPDATE
3.4.0 has been pushed as the most recent kernel update. This will require recompiling the drivers in addition to commenting the two lines out of uaccess_64.h. Make sure you've rebooted into the new kernel before compiling the driver. To compile go to the directory where the amd-driver-installer-12-4-x86.x86_64.run file is and type:

./amd-driver-installer-12-4-x86.x86_64.run --extract fglrx

You will then need to edit ./fglrx/common/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/kcl_ioctl.c and add the line

DEFINE_PER_CPU(unsigned long, old_rsp);

on line 220 directly under the end of the multi-line comment. You also need to edit line 4157 of ./fglrx/common/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/firegl_public.c to be

for_each_possible_cpu(p)

. After this, execute

./fglrx/common/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/make.sh

as root. If you get an error about no make target for libfglrx_ip.a, then copy the one from ./fglrx/arch/x86_64/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod to ./fglrx/common/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/ and try again. Finally, run

./fglrx/common/lib/modules/fglrx/make_install.sh

as root then

reboot

to check your results, which I do by seeing if this command correctly outputs a temperature.

aticonfig --adapter=0 --od-gettemperature