[SOLVED] problem installing AMD proprietary video driver
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My home laptop is a Dell Inspiron 15R with the hybrid video card AMD Radeon HD 7730M.
Last night I installed Slackware64-14.0 (stable) and dropline gnome - which doesn't runs / installs on -current. (BTW, kudos for the great work!)
Then I followed http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware: proprietary_graphics_drivers's "AMD (ATI) Catalyst Driver Installation and Configuration" section to the letter.
The driver I got is "amd-driver-installer-catalyst-13.1-linux-x86.x86_64.zip".
I blacklisted on /etc/modprobe.d/radeon_blacklist.conf both radeon and radeonhd.
After rebooting into runlevel 3 I ran "# aticonfig --initial -f".
But when I try to "$ startx", I get a segmentation fault at address 0x38 and X gives up.
It's a hybrid card, it uses the CPU's intel for day-to-day and power saving stuff and AMD's for high performance. I'm pretty sure I can't disable either one in BIOS.
Getting the AMD GPU working on a hybrid laptop is currently a hit or miss situation.. I'm not familiar with any sure-fire way to get it working, though I know others have, and it sounds to me like your result is definitely 'miss'.
Great... Let us see what happens in the next month or so!
I always preferred nVidia for my linux hardware, but nowadays all affordable laptops seem to come with these new hybrid GPUs.
At work I'm struggling with a nVidia optimus, but that's matter for another thread.
No special software is needed like Bumblebee for Optimus laptops. Sometimes the fglrx driver supports these setups without any special work, and sometimes it doesn't. The only thing you can do is install the catalyst driver and try.
As a post note, I solved a problem with the driver loading on my slackware64.
It didn't found the driver of fglrx (of libGL, I believe, with the proprietary driver of ATI/AMD)
I checked the Xorg log and saw that it has been looked for in the wrong directory.
it was at /usr/lib64 directory, but the driver was looking for it on /usr/lib, so I created a hard link at /usr/lib/fglrx pointing to /usr/lib64/fglrx.
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