Fedora
More Issues With ATI Drivers And Fedora 10
The fglrx (OpenGL) drivers on a Fedora 10 64-bit system broke following a Feb. 25 update to Xorg-x11 and installation of the latest ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 9.2 drivers.
System specs:
Kernel: 2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.x86_64
CPU: Quad Q9400 @ 2.66GHz
Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
Xorg-x11 packages updated:
Feb 25 01:56:58 Updated: xorg-x11-server-common-1.5.3-13.fc10.x86_64
Feb 25 01:57:15 Updated: xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.5.3-13.fc10.x86_64
Use ATI's fglrx uninstall script:
Download the latest official ATI Radeon 9.2 driver.
Grant executable permissions on the installer package (this post assumes you are in the directory where your downloaded ATI driver is):
Run the installer:
Select "Install Driver 8.582 on X.org 7.4 64-bit."
Select "Automatic" installation.
Restart your system following installation. If you don't restart your system and attempt a fglrxinfo, you'll most likely receive a segmentation fault.
If your fglrx (OpenGL) driver works fine after installing ATI's Radeon 9.2 driver, congrats. You can find out if your fglrx drivers are broken by attempting some of the below.
Wine programs that require 3D support will throw the alert:
If you attempt to get fglrxinfo or glxinfo:
Uninstalling the 9.2 drivers and rolling back to the 9.1 (or even 8.12) drivers solved the problems on my test system.
What the output of fglrxinfo should look like:
Unless you are a sadomasochist and enjoy running through hoops to figure out why your video card isn't working every few months in Linux, go with a Nvidia card. Some of the issues are not AMD's fault -- I'm guessing a large percentage of Linux developers are working with Nvidia cards, but ATI's official drivers are notoriously buggy.
Your mileage and aggravation with the combination of Linux and ATI may vary.
Starting a VMware Machine Hangs At 95%
Seen on multiple machines running Fedora 10 and CentOS 5.2 with VMware Server 2.0.0 installed.
Symptoms: The Virtual Machine hangs at 95% during startup.
Rerunning VMware's configuration tool seems to resolve this issue, at least for me.
Reason: Whenever a kernel update occurs, VMware's pre-compiled modules error out in the currently running kernel. Reconfiguring isn't always needed, but if your Virtual Machine hangs at 95% -- it's worth a try.
GRUB Hangs With A Blinking Cursor And grub-install Fails
If you boot a Fedora or Red Hat system and find yourself staring at the text GRUB with a blinking cursor, then GRUB (Grand Unified Boot Loader) is missing files or damaged.
Grab your operating system installation disk and boot into rescue mode.
Don't bother with grub-install as it is broken and not being fixed.
Enter GRUB's command line interface:
Find GRUB's installation location:
Re-install GRUB -- my location was (hd0,1), yours may be different:
Exit rescue mode:
If GRUB still doesn't load correctly, check the syntax of your grub.conf file. Re-enter rescue mode:
