After a night out I was about to go to bed when I saw the news that ATI has released a new version of ATI Catalyst™ 9.8 Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver, its proprietary display drivers for Linux. I immediately downloaded the drivers to test with my Fedora 11 as I am getting more and more desperate to watch HD Movies 😐 Installed them on a manually compiled kernel 2.6.27 and the build failed 🙁 Installed the latest kernel version (for fedora 11) 2.6.29.6.xxx and build failed yet another time. Switched back to 2.6.27 and tried to build again. This time build was successful. Everything worked as expected. I was getting 1500FPS with glxgears and 300FPS with fgl_glxgears. But after sometime display hanged inturn freezing the system. Hard reboot was the only solution and then this happened for a few times in a row. Now, I am back to radeonhd, waiting for yet another release of ATI drivers so that I can try them yet another time to see yet another failure 🙁

Update : Drivers are working now. Move on to How To: Install ATI Catalyst (fglrx) 9.8 Drivers on Fedora 11.

Yesterday, AMD released ATI Catalyst™ 9.7 Proprietary Linux x86/x86_64 Display Drivers. I happened to checkout the website today. Initially I was very excited about it hoping that these drivers will work with 2.6.29+ and I’ll be able to use my ATI Radeon HD 3200 which is lying dead since a fortnight or so. I downloaded the drivers immediately and switched to Fedora 11 default kernel. Installed the drivers and checked the install log located at /usr/share/ati/fglrx-install.log. And I saw a failure. AMD disappointed me, yet another time 🙁

In case you happen to screw your graphics display while trying to install ATI drivers, use the following command to uninstall fglrx.

[root@fedora ~]$ /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh

Well, I am back to square one. Have to wait for another month and I hope next release will have support for kernel 2.6.29+.

Update : Drivers are working now. Move on to How To: Install ATI Catalyst (fglrx) 9.8 Drivers on Fedora 11.