Fedora20 + Gnome + ATI (xorg or AMD driver)

asked 2014-08-13 14:00:18 -0600

Foxy
11 ●1 ●1 ●2

Hi guys,

I am running Fedora20 on a laptop with ATI FirePro M7820 video card. I've just figured that I have no accelration at all, looking around I understand that xorg-ati driver can not manage my specifi model of Video card ! I tried the AMD driver following tutorial ( with the 3.14-kernel patch ) but I am using gnome and there is an incompatibility ....

do you have any tips that can make my video card work with the xorg-ati open driver or make gnome work with amd driver :)

here is my configuration

kernel

3.15.8-200.fc20.x86_64

dmidecode gives

Handle 0x2900, DMI type 41, 11 bytes
    Onboard Device
        Reference Designation: ATI FirePro M7820             
        Type: Video
        Status: Enabled
        Type Instance: 1
        Bus Address: 0000:01:00.0

lspci gives

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Broadway XT [Mobility Radeon HD 5870]

fglrx driver gives ( in Xorg.0.log)

[    21.729] (--) fglrx(0): Chipset: "AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series" (Chipset = 0x68a0)
[    21.729] (--) fglrx(0): (PciSubVendor = 0x1028, PciSubDevice = 0x12ef)

radeon driver gives ( in Xorg.1.log with no xorg.conf and all defaut settings)

[  6960.376] (EE) Screen 0 deleted because of no matching config section.
[  6960.376] (II) UnloadModule: "radeon"
[  6960.376] (EE) Device(s) detected, but none match those in the config file.

thanks for your help !

answered 2014-08-13 19:05:09 -0600

passthejoe

191 ●1 ●4 ●10

updated 2014-08-13 19:11:35 -0600

The proprietary AMD Catalyst driver should work with your graphics card according to http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDCatalyst14-4LINReleaseNotes.aspx

However, GNOME 3 is not working with Catalyst without some retweaking that I'm not interested in doing.

So I'm running AMD Catalyst, which you can get here http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Linux+x86#amd-catalyst-packages , with Xfce as my desktop environment. It'll also work with KDE.

You do need quite a few dependencies before installing Catalyst.

I list all the dependencies in this post: http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog/linux/fedora/2014_0502_kernel_packages_in_fedora

To save you the click, here they are:

kernel-devel
kernel-headers
kernel-modules-extras
kernel-tools
kernel-tools-libs
dkms
gcc
binutils
make

Running AMD Catalyst, even from RPM packages, isn't something I recommend for everybody. It can be a pain in the rear. But if you can't get graphics working (or working well) any other way, it's certainly worth a try.

Note: I noticed that you already tried fglrx, so you have successfully installed it. I guess the rest of this answer is for people wondering how to use AMD's installer instead of RPM packages.

But in your case, there are tweaks to GNOME 3 to allow it to run with AMD Catalyst, but I'm just not going there myself. I'd rather run any of the other desktop environments and hope that someone, somewhere in Fedora gets interested in bringing Catalyst and GNOME 3 back together.

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Thank you for your answer !!

In fact my users do not want to change Gnome ! I have 2 solutions : 1/ try to make gnome work with fglrx - do you have any idea what to do ? 2/ make the xorg ati recognize my hardware - I guess it can be harder.

Thanks again

Foxy ( 2014-08-14 13:42:46 -0600 )edit

This thread on the Fedora Forum is long and rambly, but it seems to be where you can find out about patched GNOME that works with Catalyst:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=295881&page=12

passthejoe ( 2014-08-14 17:53:10 -0600 )edit

@Foxy Please stop with the Gnome 3 hate. Many users, myself included want Gnome 3, and that's the group of users we are talking about. Other groups of users aren't asking such questions. Also, Xorg recognizes the hardware just fine.

There are two issues. First the driver is built against an older kernel, and the new kernel's interfaces have slightly changed. Second Gnome 3 has some experimental Wayland stuff that the proprietary driver doesn't support. Both can be patched up, but it's a real pain (and not a long term solution).

edwbuck ( 2014-10-13 07:39:28 -0600 )edit

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