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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Wed, 07 Aug 2013

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.

Posted: Aug 07, 2013 6:16pm UTC

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Category: /linux/video_drivers/

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