Downgrade from linux to linux-lts to install catalyst-hd234k

samorost · 2015-10-12 04:46:14

Hey guys,

since I have a rather old ATI Radeon HD3800 I found out that I have to install a legacy driver, if I wan't to go proprietary. As the wiki stated, I would have to downgrade xorg do 1.16, so I did that. But trying to install catalyst-hook from the personal repo lead to errors, stating that xorg should be <1.13, so I downgraded to 1.12. Doing all this I found out, that the driver doesn't work with kernel 4.2 anymore and that I would have to roll back to lts. (Latest comment on https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/cata … al-hd234k/, though this is AUR and not the repo, and it has "total" in it's name, so I dont know, but if I try to run pacman it say's "could not resolve linux<4.2). So, I installed linux-lts, rebooted, still 4.2. Found out I had to rebuild grub config, did that, now I'm booted in linux-lts. Uname says "Linux arch 4.1.10-2-lts #1 SMP Wed Oct 7 21:57:44 CEST 2015 x86_64 GNU/Linux", but pacman still yields the error "could not resolve linux<4.2". What's going on?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AM … the_driver
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Un … yst-hd234k

olive · 2015-10-13 11:27:13

I know I do not exactly answer your question, but are you sure you need the proprietary driver. In my case, the oss driver works out of the box, and give even better results (moving and resizing windows are very sluggish with catalyst). Only if you have a very recent graphic card, it might be worthwhile to install the catalyst driver because it might supports 3D on these recent cards a little better. But on older hardware, I think the oss driver is just better.

Last edited by olive (2015-10-13 11:29:06)

Xabre · 2015-10-13 11:39:31

Linux-lts does not replace standard linux package, they are installed side by side. That's why you get the dependancy issue when trying to build catalyst-hd234k.
If you want to keep linux along with linux-lts, just remove the dependancy on linux<4.2 in PKGBUILD, while making sure to always use linux-lts for catalyst.

On other note, I also strongly suggest trying free driver.

samorost · 2015-10-13 13:06:29

I was on the oss driver, I just wanted to switch because I was told the proprietary would be with better performance. I switched back to it now anyway, because allthough I could get makepkg to work by editing PKGBUILD, booting up didn't go well. (Very funny: I accidentally found out, that I had installed x86_64 and I wasn't even aware that I have a 64 bit CPU. LOL) Due to lack of experience I can't even give details why it crashed or what. Just hung up after some boot-messages with much HDD activity (yes, with nomodeset, blacklisted radeon). Booting with "single" didn't give me any clues, nothing in dmesg that stuck out at least to my untrained eyes. Weird thing though: I was really expecting X.org causing the trouble, but I couldn't find any Xorg log that was touched in that period. Looked in /var/log/ and in ~/.local/share/xorg/...
"xinit gdm" just showed

I really have problems understanding all this as apart from a short stop at ubuntu, im pretty much new to linux. If several kernels are installed, why does pacman/makepkg(?) check for "linux", no matter of which is running? Are PKGBUILDS always made for the recent kernel? How about official packages? I could add hundreds of questions and still be confused. :[ Why is 4.2 called "linux" and 4.1 "linux-lts"? Did you rename "linux" to "linux-lts" when 4.2 came along? What happended then?

Btw: Could you recommand a comprehensible source to get a good understanding how things are done in linux?

Last edited by samorost (2015-10-13 13:11:23)

Trilby · 2015-10-13 13:15:35

samorost wrote:

why does pacman/makepkg(?) check for "linux", no matter of which is running? Are PKGBUILDS always made for the recent kernel?

Always, no. But that one is. And pacman does just what it is told. If the PKGBUILD requires linux of a certain version, then there must be a package that provides linux of that version.

The problem is that linux-lts does not provide 'linux' of any version. You could rebuild linux-lts to provide linux=some.version.number - or probably much more easy would be to create a dummy package that provides linux=needed.version.number. The issue is that this package would conflict with the mainline kernel. Linux-lts is - by design - able to be installed along side the main kernel package - but you need to *replace* the main kernel package (pkgname=linux) with an earlier version.

olive · 2015-10-14 08:32:28

I think what confuse the poster about the kernel is that other distributions like ubuntu treat the kernel specially allowing to have multiple versions of the kernel installed. So to clarify. In arch you have linux and linux-lts. They are just normal packages containing a specific version of the kernel (that is apparent from the package version, just like normal packages). You can install both linux and linux-lts (and configuring the boot manager accordingly) but apart from that you can't have several versions of the kernel installed, just like normal packages (well you can if you proceed manually outside of the package manager). Other distributions treats the kernel specially in case of a problem, to allow you to easily boot the older kernel. I am not convinced it is really essential. Plently of other packages can make the system completely unusable if they are broken and they don't come in several versions anyway.

Last edited by olive (2015-10-14 08:34:33)

Arch Linux

#1 2015-10-12 04:46:14

Downgrade from linux to linux-lts to install catalyst-hd234k

#2 2015-10-13 11:27:13

Re: Downgrade from linux to linux-lts to install catalyst-hd234k

#3 2015-10-13 11:39:31

Re: Downgrade from linux to linux-lts to install catalyst-hd234k

#4 2015-10-13 13:06:29

Re: Downgrade from linux to linux-lts to install catalyst-hd234k

#5 2015-10-13 13:15:35

Re: Downgrade from linux to linux-lts to install catalyst-hd234k

#6 2015-10-14 08:32:28

Re: Downgrade from linux to linux-lts to install catalyst-hd234k

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