Why do ATI drivers(catalyst) not work with Fedora 16?

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As far as I know the catalyst drivers were not updated to the xorg version in F16 until recently. Now they have been released, but far from stable. I believe as soon as they are usable, the catalyst guide will be updated at http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=155503

You are right, AMD catalyst drivers are not compatible with Fedora 16. I had a similar problem to yours on my Sony S series vaio laptop. Downloaded and installed the Catalyst drivers 11.11 (http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx) but on reboot, the login screen never shows. Halfway through the boot up, the screen goes blank and hangs. The only way out is to login via a console as root and unistall the driver to return the system to the initial state with the opensource drivers. Well, while the opensource drivers allow gui login and all it kills the battery life due to cpu/gpu overheat and excessive fan noise. :( We hope that the opensource drivers are rendered compatible to catalyst in a soon to be released Fedora.

I'm using kernel 3.2.9-1 with Xorg-1.11.4-1 with kmod-catalyst. It's not working as well as one would want it but if your screen is just blanking on boot when it should show you the login screen, press ctrl+alt+backspace and restart X. It works for me. (also make sure you're using the rdblacklist=radeon boot option if you haven't already)