Fedora 14 Installation Guide

Pre-built packages from RPMFusion

RECOMMENDED METHOD

This is easier than building the driver from AMD as you don't need to worry about passing kernel options via GRUB, configuring DKMS or rebuilding the kernel module every time you do a kernel upgrade.

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 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 AMD driver

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

Kernel Modules

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 package, 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 install automatically builds a new kernel module at boot-time when the kernel is upgraded, so you never have to worry about this.

Offical AMD Driver

Note: This procedure is untested.

Preinstall required packages

The script from AMD builds a kernel module, so we're going to need to install some development packages.

su -
yum install kernel-devel gcc

If you're on 64-bit you may also have to install this package too. (you do for 64-bit nVidia drivers so I had it installed anyway)

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

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, check one of the Ubuntu guides for the correct syntax.

GRUB boot config

Ensure there's a radeon.modeset=0 entry on the end of your kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst file, you could also use nomodeset here.

I expect the AMD install script will do this for you.

title Fedora (2.6.35.14-103.fc14.x86_64)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.35.14-103.fc14.x86_64 ro root=UUID=blah LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYTABLE=us rhgb quiet radeon.modeset=0
        initrd /initramfs-2.6.35.14-103.fc14.x86_64.img