For several months, I've had a couple problems with my X display. The first is an occasional seg fault that cascades thru all applications, leaving me with nothing, and requiring a reboot.

The second is that all mozilla derived browsers -- firefox, epiphany, icecat -- crash very frequently. Sometimes this requires a reboot or restart of the display.

Since I am not seeing complaints from other people about this for my distro (f14), but it did not happen on the same hardware with my previous install (f10), I'm putting it down to some combination of software.

My first suspect is the ati catalyst video driver. I don't use GL much, so I actually don't need the proprietary driver installed all the time. If it is the problem, I'd like to leave it installed for when I need it, but mostly use the kernel's native radeon driver.

I had hoped this would be as simple as removing the fglrx driver and loading radeon, but that doesn't work -- when I start X again, the kernel loads fglrx. I changed the xorg conf to use the "ati" (xorg) driver; this leads to "no signal" to the monitor and I have to reboot.

So: has anyone done this successfully? Any ideas?

If it isn't fglrx, I'm going to have to try installing a different distro, then switching window managers, etc, so I'd like to make a decent try of this first.

Can you remotely log into the box after you attempt to start it with the ati driver listed in your xorg.conf file?

Adam

Didn't try -- what would the significance of that be?

What I've done for now is remove fglrx for my current kernel. That works, it loads the ati driver, and uses the modified xorg.conf. Kind of puzzled by why simply rmmoding fglrx and swapping in the ati driver wouldn't work.

I presume this has something to do with the whole proprietary catalyst package and a lack of respect for the system and the user: even after disabling the init script it uses via ntsysv, fglrx was still loading at boot-up. Which there is no reason for, since I boot into runlevel 3 by default and start X manually. AFAIK, the kernel generally does not load modules except as required or when asked...

Heh-heh. Right after I wrote that, I remembered about the module blacklists in /etc/modprobe.d. Sure enough, radeon was blacklisted so that it would not interfere with fglrx. So I changed that around, re-installed the catalyst package, and am still able to use radeon by default. Which is what I wanted.

So for posterity:
- edit your xorg.conf
- disable the catalyst init script
- blacklist fglrx in modprobe configuration

Now I just have to see if my browser/wm/etc, can keep from crashing for a day...