Problem with ATI drivers

Mr. Jones · 2010-06-21 13:45:26

Hello again (I've posted already in the 'Pacman' forum).

Yesterday I installed Arch successfully and used the free driver for my ATI Radeon HD 4350 ( pacman -S xf86-video-ati ati-dri libgl ). Unfortunately, when I arrived to the desktop in my KDE 4.4.4 I found that transparecy wasn't working.

In the past I had installed Arch with an ATI Radeon X1330 or similar with the same free drivers, and everything worked ok.

After seeing the problem, I have tried to uninstall the free driver and installed the proprietary one ( yaourt -S catalyst ). Unfortunately, yaourt doesn't seem to be able to build the package. I have downloaded the .run from ATI's website, have executed it from the konsole, but it says that it has found errors during installation.

All this finishes in a console login (kdm doesn't start anymore). I have uninstalled catalyst (yaourt -Rs catalyst ) and reinstalled the free one again, then done Xorg -configure, but is says again that there were errors.

Now I think I will have to format and install Arch another time, but I would like to know what driver would you use, and which one you use if you have that video card or a similar model.

At the moment, Arch doesn't boot anymore (I haven't tried the 'Archlinux Fallback' entry in grub) so I think that the best will be a fresh install.

Thanks for the support

Perry3D · 2010-06-21 15:19:29

What means "it doesn't boot"? When does it stop?

Which driver? What do you want to do with your PC? Some gaming? Then choose the catalyst driver. The 3D-Performance of this driver is a lot faster. And you can use full video decoding (if your cpu is too weak). But this driver is not officially supported by Arch. But Vi0L0 is doing a good job and offers a repository for the catalyst driver: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI_Catalyst .
Don't install the driver from the ATI page. It is complicated to remove and will not work, cause the current kernel and X-server are not supported.

But the OS drivers also have some advantages: Kernel Mode Settings (you get the full resolution everywhere, even outside of X), it is fully supported by Arch and video quality is perfect (but at the moment there is no video decoding on your GPU). 3d hardware acceleration is ok, you can run compiz and some simple games.

Mr. Jones · 2010-06-21 15:31:36

Perry3D wrote:

What means "it doesn't boot"? When does it stop?
Which driver? What do you want to do with your PC? Some gaming? Then choose the catalyst driver. The 3D-Performance of this driver is a lot faster. And you can use full video decoding (if your cpu is too weak). But this driver is not officially supported by Arch. But Vi0L0 is doing a good job and offers a repository for the catalyst driver: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI_Catalyst .
Don't install the driver from the ATI page. It is complicated to remove and will not work, cause the current kernel and X-server are not supported.
But the OS drivers also have some advantages: Kernel Mode Settings (you get the full resolution everywhere, even outside of X), it is fully supported by Arch and video quality is perfect (but at the moment there is no video decoding on your GPU). 3d hardware acceleration is ok, you can run compiz and some simple games.

It tries to start kdm but the screen keeps black, and there's no option to do a console login.

What I would like is to have desktop effects, such as transparencies in KDE SC. Unfortunately, I didnt have those effects with the free driver in my HD 4350. I don't mind if I can't play on Linux, by now (until Steam is released), so I am open to use the free driver, if it allows me to have transparency and Kwin effects.

I will try that repository as soon as I can, thanks (now I'm at work and don't have access to the PC).

Thanks

dcc24 · 2010-06-21 16:30:51

So... you have tried AMD's installer without reading the wiki... and your system broke? What a surprise!

Always do the following:
- Check the wiki
- Search the forums
- Ask in the forums
- Ask in IRC
- If none of the above works, then move on to other options.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-06-21 13:45:26

Problem with ATI drivers

#2 2010-06-21 15:19:29

Re: Problem with ATI drivers

#3 2010-06-21 15:31:36

Re: Problem with ATI drivers

#4 2010-06-21 16:30:51

Re: Problem with ATI drivers

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