Arch Linux

Installing and using fglrx drivers on Arch Linux should be a piece of cake, as the distro provides pre-built packages in its official repos, accessible through the pacman package manager.

The installation instructions I've taken straight from Arch's own wiki page, linked below in the External Resources section.

Installation

Stock Kernels

kernel26

To install ATI's Catalyst drivers for the kernel26 package, you need to install the catalyst package.

   # pacman -Sy catalyst

Notes

• These packages contain only the kernel module, and depend on the catalyst-utils package. The catalyst-utils package is kernel-independent and provides the libraries and utilities for Xorg, including ATI's own libGL.so.
• After installing the package, you'll need to either source /etc/profile or log out, then back in to set up the environment properly.
• If you run both kernel26 and kernel26beyond then install both catalyst module packages. They won't conflict with one another.

Custom Kernels

To install fglrx for a custom kernel, you'll need to build your own ati-fglrx-$kernel package, containing the kernel module compiled specifically for your kernel.

If you are at all uncomfortable or inexperienced making packages, read up Arch's ABS wiki page first so things go smoothly.

Obtaining PKGBUILD

Obtain the PKGBUILD and ati-fglrx.install files from CVS or ABS. Either:

• Visit http://www.archlinux.org/packages.php?id=10416 and click "View CVS Entries" to find them, or
• Run abs as root and locate the files in /var/abs/extra/modules/ati-fglrx.

Editing the PKGBUILD and building

Three changes need to be made here:

First, change

   pkgname=catalyst

to

   pkgname=catalyst-KERNEL_NAME

where KERNEL_NAME is whatever you want (custom, mm, themostawesomekernelever)

Second, remove kernel26 from the dependencies list.

Third, change

   _kernver=2.6.15-ARCH

to

   _kernver=`uname -r`

(or directly insert the output of uname -r when running your custom kernel there)

Finally, build and install the package. (makepkg -i or makepkg followed by pacman -A pkgname.pkg.tar.gz)

Notes

• No changes need to be made to the catalyst-utils package, which is completely kernel-independent. All you need to do is compile a kernel module.
• To build and run the catalyst kernel module with 2.6.16 kernels, patches are needed! Check out the cvs entries for ati-fglrx in testing for the required patch.

Related Resources

• Arch Linux Homepage
• Arch Linux Forums
• http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI