I'm on Kali Linux 1.1.0a which is essentially Debian I believe, right? I was hoping someone here might have an idea whats happening here. Feel free to move the thread to a more appropriate board if I'm wrong here.

I'm using a Dell Latitude E6540 with a hybrid Intel GPU and AMD 8790M. I've done a full install on the SSD, this is not live or VM. I occasionally see a black screen with a non-blinking cursor in the top left. I am able to get to tty1 by pressing ctrl+alt+F1 and log in. Graphical mode fails to start about half the time and that was before I attempted to install the AMD drivers. This issue is happening out of the box, immediately after a fresh install.

I followed the instructions here in attempt to install the AMD drivers but when I do it seems everything but the actual driver installs, I get no errors and afterwards apt-get says everything is installed including the fglrx-driver. System info tells me the driver installed is "Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 0x209)" and Catalyst Control Center says no ATI driver is installed. The good news is that gnome fallback still loads about half the time. It would seem that the mesa driver is still in use or perhaps the integrated Intel GPU is throwing things for a loop? I didn't go through the steps of changing GRUB yet as the ATI driver says its not installed at all so I didn't see the point. Also if its important this is dual booted with Win7.

If it is possible I'd love to have the AMD GPU working for cracking purposes and I'm pretty sure sorting this out would fix the issue of the GUI not loading half the time. I'm new to this issue with AMD/ATI drivers as I've made it a point to avoid ATI in the past but. ..company laptops, ya know? That said, if there's any more info or outputs you'd need let me know because I'm not sure what commands would show you what you'd need to know to help me out on this. My guess is that I need to remove whatever other display driver is actually in use and start the install process again but I have no idea how to do that. I have removed the ATI packages and the GUI still loads about half the time as it always did. Thank you for any assistance.

Well, if im reading this right, and you have a hybrid GPU, then you might need to go into the BIOS and select the option to use integrated graphics instead of hybrid. I have typically had issues with this in the past. Now, that being said, you still need the GPU for cracking as you said, and I am not sure if this will interfere or not. I don't believe it will, because essentially altering the BIOS will just allow the GUI to load, and then you can install the drivers and use whatever program you are using to select the GPU for your purposes.

bad news
Kali is CUDA ready
as in NVIDIA only CUDA

for ati you need to use the CPU and openCL that a lot of the kali tools can also use

bummer how many cores is in the laptop
mind you DESKTOP and Laptop intel i3,i5,and i7's ARE NOT THE SAME!!!!!
there is a VERY big difference in a desktop i5 and a laptop i5 - they are NOT the same CPU



buy a NVIDIA based computer next time

Oh you can definitely use AMD, it just requires a lot more fuss. The issue is the fact its a hybrid. The only difference is the nvidia stuff is "whitelisted" per se. Do some research into whether or not that particular card is compatible with the driver listed in that tutorial you posted Archeo.