Fedora 8 Installation Guide

General Status

• Fedora 8 is included as a generatable package since version 8.42.3 of the AMD Proprietary Linux driver. "sh ati-driver-installer-8.42.3-x86.x86_64.run --listpkg | grep -i fedora" shows "Fedora/F8" in the output.
• Unfortunately the driver kernel module currently fails to compile since Linux kernel version 2.6.23 is not yet supported. See this bugzilla report for kernel 2.6.23 for more information.

Installation Option #1 Freshrpms.net repository

rpm -ihv http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/8/freshrpms-release/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm
yum install -y ati-x11-drv

and restart your system.

Installation Option #2 Livna repository

rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm

• These instructions on the Unoffical Fedora FAQ work. (In order not to duplicate the the instructions, we provide the link rather than the instructions themselves).

Installation Option #3 via ATI Installer

The above bugzilla contains a patch to the firegl module source code. Here is an annotated walk-through for those not familiar with using the patch utility:

• Install the driver interactively

sh ati-driver-installer-8.42.3-x86.x86_64.run

• Backup the existing module, download the patch

cd /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/
cp firegl_public.c firegl_public.c.orig
wget -qO- http://ati.cchtml.com/attachment.cgi?id=466 > firegl.patch

• Apply the patch

patch -p0 < firegl.patch

• Now build and install the kernel module

./make.sh
cd .. ; ./make_install.sh

• Create an initial X Server configuration file

aticonfig --initial

• Restart your X Server (by logging in/out or rebooting)

Issues

• AMD/ATI Catalist Control Center (amdcccle) fails to start, see this bugzilla entry.

FYI: this patch (and others like it) is incomplete. It fails miserably with the drm module loaded. It will not work without drm either, and what would be the point? As seen by dmesg:

[drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
[fglrx] Maximum main memory to use for locked dma buffers: 1898 MBytes.
[fglrx] ASYNCIO init succeed!
[fglrx:KCL_enable_pat] *ERROR* Pat entry 2 is already configured
[fglrx] PAT is disabled!
[fglrx:firegl_init_module] *ERROR* firegl_stub_register failed

The livna rpm incurs the same failure. Stick with F7 and kernel 2.6.22, or use the radeon driver instead.

---

Updated by yangyud:
You need to remove the loaded "drm" module from kernel before install the fglrx module.
rmmod radeon; rmmod drm

See Also

• Frequently Asked Questions#Why does fglrx not work for my bleeding-edge kernel?

Ok, the problem is gdm. I can `startx`, but gdm fails to load with fglrx, and there is no indication in any log as to why. This continues with new 7.11 Catalyst driver.