Will there really be no AMD Catalyst driver packaged by RPM Fusion for Fedora 20?

So I finally did my FedUp upgrade from Fedora 19 to 20, and one of the things hanging me up was the AMD Catalyst driver, the packages for which come from RPM Fusion.

I should have looked into this more BEFORE I did the upgrade, because there are no kmod-catalyst packages for F20.

This has happened before. Catalyst is always behind Nvidia when it comes to RPM Fusion packages.

But according to these two threads, the maintainer of kmod-catalyst is orphaning the package, and unless someone else picks it up, there will be no new Catalyst drivers packaged as RPMs for any existing Fedora releases, including F19 and F20.

The good news for me anyway is that Fedora 20 with the 3.12.5-302.fc20.x86_64 kernel marks the first time that the AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics chip in my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop has had working 3D acceleration without the proprietary Catalyst driver.

But it’s not as good of video as I get with AMD Catalyst (aka fglrx if you’re running a Debian-based distro).

Without Catalyst/fglrx, animations in GNOME 3 aren’t as smooth, games that use 3D don’t perform as well, and full-screen video in VLC stutters a bit. Again, that’s better than GNOME 3 not running at all (which is what has been happening with the open Radeon driver in recent months), but I’d rather have the choice between the open Radeon and proprietary Catalyst drivers.

Oh, and my suspend/resume situation is the same. Suspend appears to work fine, but without resume (which doesn’t work at all), why bother?

The laptop does run cooler with the proprietary driver, too.

Back to the point: I’m not willing to download and run AMD Catalyst directly from AMD. That’s always been a prescription for endless fiddling and bricked video. I have heard good things about the open Radeon driver in the 3.13.x kernel, and I will wait for that to roll into my system before I decide whether or not to abandon Fedora for a distribution that isn’t orphaning the Catalyst/fglrx driver. Among those: Debian, Ubuntu and everything derived from them.

I’ve always said I’d prefer to run the open driver, and there has been substantial progress in making my particular AMD video chip work better in Linux. But there needs to be just a little bit more performance. The stuttering video NEEDS TO GO.

And before this release, GNOME 3 did not work at all. It works now but is struggling. For me, that means more time running Xfce.

I’d love to see a dramatic improvement when the 3.13.x kernels come into Fedora. If that happens, all is forgiven. But if not, more than likely I’ll be moving from Fedora.

Update: Full-screen video in Mplayer is much better than in VLC and GNOME’s stock player. That’s a workaround but not a full-blown solution.

Why I’m using the closed Catalyst driver for Linux instead of the open Radeon driver

I’ve been using Fedora Linux for the greater part of this year, starting with F18 and upgrading via Fedup to F19. For most of that time, I’ve used the closed-source AMD Catalyst driver as packaged by RPM Fusion instead of the open Radeon driver that ships by default with Fedora and most every other Linux distribution.

I’m not proud of it. But the differences in performance are too big to ignore.

Things that stink with both drivers: Neither the open- nor the closed-source driver will resume my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop after suspend. (The machine uses the AMD A4-4300M APU with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics.)

Things that stink with the open driver: Only the Catalyst driver delivers working 3D acceleration, meaning without it I can’t run GNOME 3 at all, most games look like hell, and a certain wonkiness crops up here and there on various web pages.

With Catalyst, my glxgears frames per second are 100 times greater than with the open driver. I don’t know what glxgears fps numbers really mean, but 5,200 has got to be better than 50.

Things that stink with the closed driver: In Xfce, many application windows have lost the borders on the left and right sides. I can’t explain it.

I also cannot successfuly use UEFI secure boot with the Catalyst-enabled kernel, though I can do so without Catalyst installed. It’s not Secure Boot itself that is stopping the boot. It just hangs at some point — after some IP tables lines in the dmesg, I think. The solution is keeping EFI but turning off Secure Boot.

I’m adding GNOME to my Fedora 19 Xfce desktop

It’s been months — probably six months — since I installed Fedora 18 with Xfce on this then-new HP laptop.

The main reasons for choosing both Fedora and Xfce were the newness of the hardware. Fedora is constantly getting new kernels, and Xfce didn’t require 3D acceleration. The open-source Radeon video driver still can’t do 3D with the AMD chip in this laptop (the AMD Radeon HD 7420G). Still.

But now that I have 3D with the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver (not something I choose willingly because the open-source driver is easier and more sane to use and maintain), I can use GNOME 3/Shell if I wish.

I’ve enjoyed these many months in Xfce, which used to seem less evolved than GNOME 2 but now seems more evolved than the still-forming GNOME 3.

The addition of GNOME to this Fedora system doesn’t mean I’m getting rid of Xfce. Both will be available on this system, and like I did before in Debian Squeeze, I’ll probably switch between the two.

The only tutorial I could find on how to add all of GNOME after the fact to Fedora was wrong, so here is my mini tutorial on how to do it in Fedora 19.

Open a terminal and enter the following ($ is the prompt, so don’t type that):

$ sudo yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop"

That’s it. Then log out and log back in with GNOME as your desktop choice. I’m going to do it right now.

Later: GNOME 3 is working. It’ll be there for me to play with, but I had more trouble than usual with my company’s terrible Citrix-delivered application, so I’m back in comfortable ol’ Xfce.

Just as before, I don’t find GNOME 3 to be a resource hog, and I like its keyboard controls. I find no reason to be excited about things like GNOME Documents.

Nothing’s changed for me from the last time I had both GNOME 3 and Xfce available on the same system. I like both environments, and I expect to use both going forward.

AMD releases Catalyst 13.9 video driver for Linux — or does it?

Warning: The AMD Catalyst 13.9 Linux video driver was on the site this morning but has disappeared since then. As of 4 p.m. Pacific time on Sept. 19, 2013, it has not yet reappeared. AMD, it’s your move.

Before the driver disappeared, here is what I wrote:

Now that the 3.11 version of the Linux kernel is available on my Fedora 19 system, AMD has released a new version of its closed-source, stable driver, version 13.9, that brings support to … the 3.10 kernel.

Not that I haven’t been running the 13.6 (suspend/resume worked) and 13.8 betas (suspend/resume didn’t work in 13.8 beta 1, not sure about beta 2), because I have.

You can download the new driver here, though I recommend NEVER installing from what AMD provides and always, ALWAYS using a version packaged for your distribution, which for Fedora means the packages provided by RPM Fusion.

Running Fedora and needing AMD Catalyst for working 3D graphics means willfully ignoring new kernels that aren’t yet supported and accompanied by a new kmod-catalyst package. That’s what I’m doing with the new 3.11.1 kernel that moved into Fedora 19 today. I won’t install a 3.11 kernel until there’s a corresponding kmod-catalyst package from RPM Fusion to go with it. And given that this new 13.9 release of AMD Catalyst only supports the 3.10 kernel and isn’t yet in the RPM Fusion repository (which, given the fact that it was just released, I totally understand), I’ll wait for the next kmod-catalyst to roll onto my machine and once again test suspend-resume. If it works (like it did during the brief 13.6 beta window), I’ll be of a mind to stick with the 3.10 kernel for a good long while.

But if suspend-resume doesn’t work with the combination of Linux kernel 3.10.x and Catalyst 13.9, it’ll be back on the beta train until AMD decides to better-support the GPUs it makes, including my AMD Radeon HD 7420g.

Potential problem: I just checked the AMD page, and the new driver is (hopefully temporarily) gone.

The AMD Catalyst 13.8 beta video driver for Linux is out, and it breaks my system

So I finally get working 3D acceleration and suspend/resume and get rid of artifacts in Fedora 19 on my HP Pavilion g6 laptop (AMD A4-4300M APU with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics) with the 13.6 beta version of the AMD Catalyst driver for Linux.

Except that the 13.8 beta driver was released about a week ago, and it finally came into my system via RPM Fusion.

And it broke X. Login is fine, but most applications — including Firefox — cause X to quit and send me back to the login prompt.

Not good at all.

I had to rip out kmod-catalyst and all associated packages and return to the open-source Radeon driver, which works great — except for the aforementioned artifacts, lack of working 3D acceleration and refusal to resume after suspend.

No dependency hell here. RPM and the Yum package manager (which I’m using via the Yumex graphical front end) have performed admirably. But it’s pretty hard to revert to 13.6 due to all the other related packages that have been upgraded to 13.8.

I haven’t filed a bug on the driver just yet, and the consensus seems to be that AMD developers generally ignore such efforts. There is an “unofficial” Bugzilla instance, and Phoronix readers are discussing 13.8 as well.

So now I wait for the next build of the Catalyst driver to see if my system will like it.

No new stable AMD Catalyst driver for Linux, but there is a new 13.8 beta that runs with the 3.10 kernel

Given that releases seem to happen about every two months, I pegged July 28-31, 2013, as the time when AMD would release a new Catalyst video driver for Linux.

On Aug. 1, 2013, AMD did release a new driver, version 13.8.

The most notable changes, from my perspective anyway, are support for the 3.10 Linux kernel.

So that’s why there have been no kmod-catalyst updates from RPM Fusion for Fedora. Hopefully we will see one soon (and if it happens in the next few days, my faith in humanity, Fedora and RPM Fusion will be restored).

Keep an eye on this RPM Fusion page for a new kmod-catalyst driver.

Other than fixes of bugs I don’t understand, and besides support for the 3.10 kernel, the most notable change is the removal of the “Testing use only” watermark from the lower right corner of the screen. Annoying, that watermark is.

Here’s looking forward to a stable release of the AMD Catalyst driver that supports my newish AMD A4-4300M APU with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics.

Is my problem with Catalyst or other? I am having one issue with suspend-resume, which only works at all, by the way, with the Catalyst driver: Everything seems fine when I resume, except that the system doesn’t think I have an optical drive any more. The output of cd-drive in the terminal shows no drives available. When I reboot, the drive returns to the ranks of living peripherals.

Fedora 19 with the AMD Catalyst 13.6 driver: Optical drive disappears after suspend/resume

This is the problem I’m having, except it’s in Fedora, not Slackware:

Basically, I have no problem with the optical drive during normal operation. But once I suspend and then resume, it’s gone.

Here is the output of cd-drive:

[steven@shr ~]$ cd-drive
cd-drive version 0.90 x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu
Copyright (c) 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2012 R. Bernstein
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
No loaded CD-ROM device accessible.
Drivers available...
  GNU/Linux ioctl and MMC driver     
  cdrdao (TOC) disk image driver     
  bin/cuesheet disk image driver     
  Nero NRG disk image driver

If anybody has any ideas on how to “resurrect” the DVD drive after a resume, I’m ready to try ‘

40 Seconds of Linux: The AMD Catalyst 13.6 driver (video)

My HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop uses an AMD APU (combination CPU and GPU) that is so new, both the open-source Radeon driver and the closed-source AMD Catalyst (formerly fglrx) driver don’t support it.

Until now.

The newish AMD Catalyst 13.6 driver — now in beta — handles my AMD APU and its AMD Radeon HD 7420g graphics perfectly.

You can get the driver directly from AMD, but I never recommend doing that. Instead, wait until somebody packages it for your distribution.

The 13.6 driver is still in beta, and I haven’t seen packages for any distributions except Fedora. And since I’m using Fedora 19 and have the RPM Fusion repositories on my system, I got the 13.6 beta automatically after my fedup upgrade from F18.

It solved all of my video problems. I await the stable version, but if you run Fedora 19, you can enjoy it now.

There is one more 40 Seconds of Linux videos in the can.

Fedora 18 to 19 upgrade with fedup: It’s alive!

After a shaky start with Fedora’s fedup update tool to bring my Fedora 18 with Xfce system to Fedora 19, I did manage to successfully upgrade my HP Pavilion g6-2210us (with AMD A4-4300M APU, which features AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics).

After a curl error on my work network, I started the process on my much slower home network, quickly bypassed the error and started on the slow process of downloading 1,800+ packages.

The AMD Catalyst 13.6 proprietary video driver will support the latest AMD APUs — and I really need it

Given that my still-shiny, still-new HP Pavilion G6-2210-us laptop with an AMD A4-4300M APU that features AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics is not well-supported in Linux’s current open-source Radeon driver, I’ve been looking to AMD’s proprietary Catalyst video driver for help.

I’ve tried the current version — 13.4. X won’t even start.

That’s because my APU is so new, even the Catalyst driver doesn’t support it.

But help is on the way. Version 13.6 of Catalyst does support the Radeon HD 7420G, according to the release notes.