Error when installing AMD Catalyst driver
 

I am suffering occasional disturbances in Libre Writer. Writing can disappear at times or appear where it is not supposed to be. I have tried installing drivers for my Sapphire Radeon GPU but get ¨One or more of the tools required for installation cannot be found on the system¨ i have tried many things using sudo apt-get that people have suggested, but no success. The driver i have downloaded is the only one that came up in the search on AMD (the Sapphire site tried to send me there (got a 404 but worked out it was just the ati support site judging by url))

Specs:
PCLinuxOS KDE 64-bit fully updated
Custom PC (Asus A8R32 MVP ´board)
CrossFireX 2x Sapphire Radeon HD 3870
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual core 4200+ (i think, no sticker but says at boot)

thanks, ZZII

I believe your Radeon HD 3870 requires an older fglrx driver than the ones offered currently. Here is the way you can purge the old one (it should work nearly the same for PCLinuxOS):
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troublesho...o_purge_-fglrx

Then you can install the older fglrx driver that will handle your card:
sudo apt-get install fglrx=2:8.960-0ubuntu1
sudo apt-mark hold fglrx
The apt-mark hold is absolutely necessary, because otherwise it will be killed in an update. You will still hget an update, but it will be a Recommended, and hence optional.

Good luck - I had a toungh time with that a while ago until I found those references!

thank you! i will try that right now...

(by the way today is actually day 2 of linux for me, surprised how technical it is with commands and all, you barely ever use cmd in windows)

i tried the steps, but on the link you posted the 1st sudo gave me ¨E: Couldn´t find package xorg-driver-fglrx¨. the second gave me the same but with ¨libgll-mesa-glx¨. the third line gave me ¨sudo: dpkg-reconfigure: command not found¨

Hi:

I am not familiar with pclinuxos so I did some homework.

Pclinuxos is based on Mandriva and Mandriva is origanally forked with Red Hat.
This Pclinuxos website might come in handy in the future.
http://www.pclinuxos.com/

This tutorial on "fglrx" might help you and albinard.-:)
http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Fglrx#Driver

Look in your Synaptic Package Manager the fglrx driver might be in there and that way Synaptic could install it for you.
http://pclinuxoshelp.com/index.php/U...Your_PCLinuxOS

thanks, but i am confused with the 2nd link. it´s a bit too confusing for me (used windows for 11 years, linux for 2 days)

on the 3rd one, i searched for both fglrx and catalyst and found AMD proprietary x.org driver and libraries. it says to configure the card using xfdrake. i searched for that too and it said already had it. how do i configure using xfdrake? i am still getting used to finding programs on pclinuxos. i haven´t installed the amd propietary driver yet because i thought id better configure using xfdrake first.

thanks

I found an article about xfdrake here:
http://www.brunolinux.com/06-Fine_Tu...g_XFdrake.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:XFdrake.png

I've never heard of xfdrake until today; sorry.

I think xfdrake is for configuring a Nvidia card.
To find out what graphics card you have open your terminal and run this command:
It will look something like mine:
The first link is what you need to do for your system but I will have to ask another member with more experience with runlevel 3. Runlevel 4 gives your the GUI so I'm not sure if you would go into konsole mode by holding down Ctrl+Alt+F2 or not. On my system I had to edit a file to change the run level.

Anytime that I installed the AMD drivers on any of my Linux boxes the drivers were very buggy and I had graphics issues.

After consulting with a member here at LQ I think it would be much easier for you to install the AMD Driver.

1. Download the AMD Catalyst Driver. (AMD Catalyst™ 14.12 Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver)
Here on this page. http://support.amd.com/en-us/downloa...p?os=Linux+x86

2. Leave it in your Downloads directory.

3. Open your Downloads directory and keep it open. Than open the terminal and type:
cd Downloads hit Enter.
Than you will have yourname@xxxx Downloads type ls and all that you have in your downloads folder will show in the terminal.

4. Now at the prompt type:
bash (name of the driver exactly word for word the way it shows in your Downloads directory).run and hit Enter.


The installer should start and walk you through installing the driver.
When finished close the installer and reboot your pc.

ok iĺl try what ztc said. i have a .run driver installer already iĺl try that. the one you specified is for 32-bit isn´t it? i have a 64 system and the installer i have is for 64.

i have 2 crossfired sapphire radeon hd 3870 cards

edit: tried it and it gave me: one or more of the tools required for installation cannot be found on the system. blah, blah, blah

i can try the driver you specified if you think its the right one for a 64-bit system.

need any other specs? there are some in the op^^^^

There should be '32-bit' and '64-bit' drivers on the AMD webpage that I linked.
Just make sure you select the 64-bit one.-:)

Nice graphic's card's you have!

Is this the right one that you have 2 of?
http://www.sapphiretech.com/presenta...?pid=150&lid=1

thanks! will be getting windows eventually to fully utilise it as a gaming pc.

yes that looks like the right one. there are a few very similar models of it and its hard to match it by looking at it as they are different regionally anyway. i know they say sapphire and hd 3870, are blue, and have the same picture of the girl on it.

got the whole pc for free minus a hdd which was cool. i suspect the secondary gpu may not work, gonna check after trying link.

There were errors during package generation. details can be found at blah blah blah

the log file said:
Package build failed!
Package build utility output:
./packages/RedHat/ati-packager.sh: line 221: rpmbuild: command not found
[Error] Generate Package - error generating package : RedHat/RHEL7_64a

Where you able to download and install the AMD driver?
When you downloaded the driver and extracted it there should of been a .run file available for installation.

Looking at this:

This refers to a Red Hat package (rpm). Not a AMD driver or .run script to install the driver.
The driver in the .run script should work well with your sapphire hd 3870 card.

That was nice to have been given a computer basically for free.

-:-If I'm not mistaken Pclinuxos uses either Synaptic or Apt as it's commandline utility.-:-
Not sure how a RH based pkg or Yum came into the picture.

Please give a little more detail.

oh sorry must´ve messed something up. i ran it fine, but it asked which os i had and it only had red hat and suse and i thought pclinuxos was built off of red hat so i went with the newest red hat that was there. iĺl run again and tell you what it said...

if the secondary gpu is broken will that affect anything?

this pc was from a gamer who´s was now using the pc which replaced the pc that replaced the pc that replaced this one i got for free. it´s a bit old. about the same specs as my laptop, much better than my old desktop that the laptop replaced (the old one is nearly 15 years old, Pentium 4 1.6ghz, 2gb ram, 18gb hdd, prehistoric riva tnt2 gpu)

If I had to guess; and the functionality of the one graphics card is failing than I would think that the initialization process will just look at the card that is broken (confirm that it's non-functional) and move on to the next one that is functioning.

If your pretty certain that the one graphic card isn't funtioning properly; when you get the chance you might want to remove it from the motherboard. If it's a laptop than it might be a little more intresting to disesemble than a desktop.

If you know which driver is assisting your graphics card you could try to dmseg the driver and read through the output and see if there is any confirmation that the card is done for.
Driver's and modules are listed in the output of the command lsmod reading through all of the output is still something I'm still learning to ensure that the modules/drivers are loading properly.

Glad to hear that your getting good use out of a pentium.
I studied that if you put a pentium and a celeron next to each other they tick at different beats.
Aside from that I think a pentium (if I recall correctly) has is about 30 % more front bus speed than a celeron.
So...that's good for you.

I've never tried Pclinuxos. What's it like?
What distribution are you actually running on your free machine?

Sorry no post for ages. I kinda give up on it now. The 2nd GPU is broken. I tried booting with the monitor connected to it and black screen. Removed and graphical performance (which was really bad for it's specs) was no different. Surprised it was as bad as it was even with one GPU broken. It's not worth gaming on at all. I'll try a new GPU (NVidia GT 700 series i had one picked out) and if it is still poor for gaming a new mobo, RAM and CPU will be in order. ( I can reuse opticals, SSD and GPU)

PCLinuxOS KDE 64-bit on the free one with the dodgy GPU.
Windows XP 2002 on the Pentium '01 PC

PCLinuxOS is my first Linux so i can only compare it to Windows. It is 100 times better than Windows. It does what it's told and is fast too. You can actually start using once it turns on. On my laptop there's a wait of 30 secs where nothing happens after the desktop first comes up. Also it takes ages sometimes to do simple tasks. 13 years on Windows, Linux blows me away.

Since the GPU is broken that's most likely why your getting the black screen or it could be an Xorg problem.
I was taught by members here with a lot of experience that if a system won't boot to desktop it has to be Xorg, the kernel, or maybe a proprietary video driver most likely.

It could also be something in the init sytem (sysvinit, startup and systemd) but in testing it's Xorg related.
You could try running and update and see if that helps. If that doesn't work try "Recovery Mode" and direct it to boot when it get's around to asking what you want. Recovery Mode runs a few more corrective tools and may fix it on it's own.

***If you can run the desktop environment as root the problem is with your user not the system at large.***

I have found that Lubuntu works great on older computers that have celeron or pentium processors.
You could give that distribution a try.

Sounds like your laptop needs a driver.

Yes, Linux is exceptionally nice, I agree.

Good luck-:)

I think I won't give up on the gaming PC's GPU. I compared it to the GTX 750 I was considering getting and it's not all THAT much better.

When booting on 2nd GPU it seems to start but I can't see anything, like monitor's unplugged. What if I just try putting the 2nd GPU in the 1st slot on it's own, that should rule out if it's dead or not (it's a pain though because the slots are weird (i know they're PCIe though they're not AGP or anything like that))

The whole system is lightning fast compared to our aging Windows systems but when you try playing Minecraft the frame rate is 25-30, and it freezes every 10 seconds or so for about a second. This made me think it was a GPU issue (driver i suppose will fix it). But rFactor is very slow and almost comes to a standstill when you start a race. It just seems to be the system is poor (2.2 GHz AMD, 4 MB RAM). I do plan to overclock though, may as well try to get SOME performance out of it.

Don't know whether to get more RAM and a new CPU (therefore new mobo) and keep the GPU, or replace the GPU and keep everything else. 1st option is probably better and will happen anyway eventually.

I may be able to get the installation disk or original HDD for it and get Windows back on it just so I can get the driver easily.

The laptop's recently been rebuilt using Dell Factory Restore though. After Welcome, the desktop shows and you can do stuff but it takes forever and after all the startup programs and services start up it's not so bad. Still not brilliant though. My mother's PC is a little similar too so I just blamed Windows.

Thank you so much for your help with my rotting system.


EDIT: 2nd GPU works in 1st slot. Me = Confused...well that saves $145

You could try that and see if it works or not.

Before you up the RAM look at the board and determine what and if it's expandable to.

Depending on the age of the computer replacing a CPU on an older mobo could create issue's.
Somehow putting a new processor on an old mobo I don't think will go to well.

I would just replace the mobo and keep the Graphics Card you have. OR purchase the GTX 750.
-::-A high performance graphics card will require a more powerful power supply.-::-

A standard ATX mobo may not fix in an older pc's tower. You might need a Mini ATX.

Your Welcome-

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...=-1&isNodeId=1

I was planning on getting a new mobo, RAM and CPU all at once. I can't increase RAM and wasn't going to get a CPU replacement. Both GPUs work. I might just get new system and keep GPUs and PSU. I want to avoid a new PSU if I can as I have a IDE DVD drive. If I get a new mobo i have a IDE to SATA data converter, but not a power converter. I'll make a new case if I get a new mobo.

As I upgrade the PC, old parts will be replaced and as they do, the old parts will slowly get put back together until I can build the old one again. This will always go on. I will never buy a entire new PC but will keep replacing parts and slowly end up with more and more old parts to rebuild all my old PCs. Weird.

I noticed that the 1st GPU's fan is really dusty, but the 2nd is perfectly clean. Sadly it appears the previous owner didn't know/couldn't fix only one GPU being used. He spent money on a card that never got used, and GPUs aren't cheap either. It would have been a really good card too because he always put great hardware into his PCs.

Not sure those drivers are ever getting installed. I'd say I'll be getting a new PC. This one's rubbish for gaming anyway (Minecraft's poor FPS is probably because of the driver issue, but rFactor seems to not be GPU related)

The IDE to SATA converter will work well.

I don't like the IDE plugs. They are very difficult to unplug.

Heavy dust could be why you had trouble with the one card.

Depending on what mobo you buy they can be pretty pricey too.
I have heard a lot of folks here say that Asus and Gigabyte make very good boards.

I've had a MSI mobo for 5 years and my desktop runs great.

I built a gaming computer for a friend and if your looking for a high end gaming board look here.
http://gaming.msi.com/products/mothe...z97-h97-series

Good luck to you and have fun building.

MSI 970. I spent ages already, searching and this is what I decided on. AMD FX-8350 CPU and I'm looking at three different 2x4GB RAM kits.

With that Graphics Card you'll need at least a 550 watt power supply.
Might ever go for 750 watts just to be on the safe side.

Cool that processor is the Black Edition, 8 Core. -:You'll be good:-

RAM went up since the last time I looked.
Kingston brand is high:-

Keep your receipt. You can mail in your rebate and MSI will give you a Visa with the rebate on it if you send it in on time.

Corsair gives their customers rebates as well. ($10-$20)

I'm keeping the old PSU and GPUs so if the guy built the old one properly it'll be good.

Roger that:-