(I used a digital camera to capture the screen images of my Windows boot failure and subsequent 8.1 upgrade failure so you can share in my pain before reading below how I fixed what Microsoft broke)

So I figured I'd upgrade the Windows 8 portion of my Windows/Fedora dual-booting (and naturally EFI-running) system to the presumably shinier, newer Windows 8.1 with the offer of an upgrade via the Microsoft Store.

Big fucking mistake.

I go into Windows 8 and do the upgrade. It tells me at some point that "there will be several reboots."

The first reboot was the last. Windows would no longer boot. (Luckily Fedora continued to boot during this whole nightmare.) When I tried to start Windows 8, I got a blue-screen error with the code 0xc000000f.

I went into Recovery Mode via the BIOS.

The automatic repair didn't work. Then I went to Advanced Options, then to the Windows command prompt, to start trying hacks.

The easy hacks didn't work.

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Debian France now has an online store where they sell Debian-related merchandise: hats, shirts, even umbrellas, pocket knives and those "buff" things that losing "Survivor" contestants throw into the fire on the show's Redemption Island (which probably tells you too much about my recent TV viewing).

The currency is Euros, the language French. May the European force be with you.

Especially while I'm obsessed with the state of AMD video drivers, but for all Linux and much BSD news, Michael Larabel's Phoronix is an essential site that I'm looking at every day.

I honestly don't know how he keeps up the pace, but if you're looking for news on the state of AMD, Nvidia and Intel video, AMD, Intel and ARM CPUs, the Linux kernel, benchmarking of hardware and Linux and BSD distribution, plus what's going on (both in plain sight and behind the scenes) in many of the projects that make up the free-software ecosystems, Michael appears to have it covered, and for that I thank him.

Thanks to the help of a few, proud Fedora users, I was able to install the AMD Catalyst 13.11 beta (version 9.95 to be exact) driver on my Xfce-running Fedora 20 system.

And thus the long local (as opposed to national) nightmare of poor video performance and a CPU running 30 to 40 degrees hotter is over.

I would love to stick around and wait for the open-source Radeon drive to get better, and I'll continue to keep an eye on it. But my test of the 3.13.rc7 Linux kernel -- which is supposed to include some key Radeon patches -- showed that it is no better on my machine than 3.12.x. That means it's not time to wait on the open driver but instead time to get serious about putting Catalyst -- direct from AMD -- on the laptop.

Today I was successful, and the CPU on my HP Pavilion g6-2210us is running at a cool 80 degrees as opposed to the not-as-cool 120 degrees under Radeon. And I can watch full-screen video in VLC (and any player other than MPlayer) without a) that video stuttering and b) both CPU cores jumping to 100 percent.

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Update: Thanks to tips from Bernhard J. Wolf, I have successfully installed the AMD Catalyst 13.11 beta driver in Fedora 20. I did not need to use Maxorete's install-file hack. When I opened the file that needed to be changed, it looked like AMD had already made the fix -- and since Catalyst did install, I can confirm that they did. Thanks, AMD! Keys to success were adding the kernel-devel package in Fedora. It probably couldn't hurt to make sure you also have kernel-headers, which I already had. Bernhard also said the installation wouldn't work with GNOME installed. GNOME, you are now history on this machine. With kernel-devel and without GNOME, the install of AMD Catalyst 13.11 beta went like butter. I will do a new post that contains all of this information, but for now I leave what I wrote earlier today in its original form below. You know, for history's sake:

Original post below (I didn't need the install-file hack)

Anybody who has read anything I've written in the past month know that the sudden absence of the AMD Catalyst driver in packaged-for-Fedora form is really chapping what's left of my Linux hide. The fact that so few seem to care is just stamping my "get out of Dodge/Fedora" ticket.

But given momentum's pull, principally the fact that I have Fedora set up the way I want it, I'd rather stay for now and move at some time in the future. When I'm ready, that is.

So I've gone against the advice I've held to since Fedora 14 crapped out on me, that advice being, Don't install Catalyst directly from AMD.

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Online Privacy: We Are The Authors Of Our Own Demise by Matt Asay. The subtitle: We used to pay with money. Now we pay with our private data. Will we regret it?