Monday, February 02, 2009

Linux Catalyst 9.1 on Fedora 10

I've been using Fedora and ATI cards together for awhile and the fglrx support has always been kinda hit and miss. The last combination that worked well was Fedora 8 and fglrx 8.10 (I believe). Anyway, when I upgraded to Fedora 10, I did not expect it work well and I had trouble with 8.11 and 8.12 various issues from no display to no 3d support.

So when 9.1 came out, I was not expecting much. However, I installed the akmod-fglrx package from rpmfusion-updates-testing today and so far I have been happy. I run a x86_64 distrobution so I had to install the additional xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-libs-8.573-1.9.1.fc10.i386 package so that 3d would work with i386 applications like SecondLife. If you don't have this installed SecondLife will run at a reduced frame rate. I have not seen other apps that have required this. And since I run dual head I had to remove the virtual setting from the screen area so that fglrx set the screen rez correctly (leaving this in caused the horizontal width to be much to wide). I used the ATI Catalyst Control Center to setup the dual head setting (in previous versions this application crashed) and restarted and everything looked correct.

But I will say that Fedora 10 and Catalyst 9.1 do work together and it seems to work well. Thanks rpmfusion!

16 comments:

Unknown said...

could you post your working /etc/X11/xorg.conf file for dual head?

Kevin DeKorte said...

# Xorg configuration created by livna-config-display

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
ModulePath "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules/extensions/fglrx"
ModulePath "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AIGLX" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"

# keyboard added by rhpxl
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105+inet"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "HDMI-0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "DVI-0"
Option "RightOf" "HDMI-0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "fglrx"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
# Virtual 4096 1280
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Kevin DeKorte said...

don't forget that after you use that to go into amdcccle and setup your displays.

Unknown said...

Strange, I have that same configuration, except I have two DVI connectors, so I have:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "DVI-1"
EndSection

However, only one of my LCD's will ever display the desktop, not both (not even a cloned image).

I previously had dual head working with the radeon driver by using the Virtual setting under SubSection "Display".

I'll post back if I get it working. At any rate the glxgears output verifies that I am getting FPS numbers in line with hardware acceleration (much better than the radeon driver), so that's half the battle :-)

Kevin DeKorte said...

With fglrx, it really only see's one connection so you actually don't want to have both connectors in the xorg.conf file (with radeon or radeonhd, you want both). So you specify one in the xorg.conf and then you use amdcccle to get the second head working. You have to remember that fglrx is only xrandr 1.1 compatible and so any of the new xrandr 1.2 and higher stuff does not apply.

Kevin DeKorte said...

Now that I think about it, the Monitors entries appear to be ignored in the xorg.conf file. So it does not matter what you have there. The amdcccle tool is really what you need to use to set up dual head.

Mudgen said...

It would be useful to know _what_ ATI card you're using. Hard to know if this is remotely applicable to my HD2600 and/or HD4650.

Kevin DeKorte said...

I'm on a ATI 3650 card, which is between the 2600 and HD4650 and so these comments should apply. Pretty much all comments about the fglrx driver are the same as long as it works with your hardware.

stikli said...

Hi Kevin,

I'm new to Linux, running Fedora 10 64bit, and so far i have never been able to get Ati dual head (dual display) mode/support work under KDE. I have a Radeon HD3870 card + Acer AL1714 LCD (1st monitor)+Belinea 10080 CRC (2nd monitor) (automatically identified by the system as Maxdata). Oddly enough, I have dual monitor support under Gnome automatically (i.e. after install, where Gnome was the default desktop environment).
If i try to install the Catalyst9.2 Linux 64bit driver package according to AMD's PDF manual (everything is auto settings, no tinkering since I'm a noob), it results in getting no graphic display (GUI).

Can you post me or recommend me a good step-by-step guide on how to get it work?

Again, I'm a complete noob to linux.

Thanx,

stikli

Kevin DeKorte said...

Stikli,

First thing I would do if I were you would be to use the rpmfusion fglrx driver rather than installing the driver from the ATI packages, this should make life a little easier. Unfortunately, you will need to remove the package you already have.

Also, in my testing I found that KDE really didn't like the second display when I tried it. And I currently don't even have KDE installed on my machine any more so I can't retest for you.

Also, I have shifted to Fedora 11 and am using the radeon driver provided with it now. But it has no 3d support but 2d and dual head do work like they are supposed to.

stikli said...

Thanx Kevin,

Based on your comment, i tend to go for one of these options:

#1 Stick with Gnome (with which i've had other problems, but most of them i was able to fix by now);

#2 Check out Fedora 11 (if i 64 bit version is available).

1001 thanks for the reply anyway :-)

Kevin DeKorte said...

I'm using Fedora 11 in 64bit mode with my 3650 card. Only 3d does not work, everything else is fine.

Mudgen said...

You're using the xorg radeon driver with F11? Not radeonhd?

Kevin DeKorte said...

Correct, I'm using radeon.. on F11 unless you have a couple of displays with a total width > 2048 you don't even really need an xorg.conf file

Mudgen said...

Interesting. I didn't know the 3650 was supported by radeon, it's not listed in the supported cards (they apparently just left that model off the RV636 list), as it is for radeonhd.

I'd used the buggier radeonhd, which does list the specific card. But now I have a 4650, which does require radeonhd--or the much better Catalyst driver from RPMFusion-nonfree, which I'm using. No more Kaffeine krashes.

Do you think you'll go back to fglrx when F11 has released and it's in the F11 repo?

Kevin DeKorte said...

I would say there is a good chance I won't ever use fglrx again, unless I have some urgent need for 3d and the radeon driver doesn't support it yet.