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Page Contents Author Introduction Licensing Issues Notes Prerequisites Installing the ATI driver Troubleshooting

Author

Bill Giannikos (bill2 at giannikos.com.au)
www.billgiannikos.com

Introduction

This guide will help you configure the proprietary ATI driver under CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. For those that don't know, CentOS 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 are basically the same thing just with a different name so this guide applies to both. I will not be covering the open source radeon driver included with Xorg because its configuration is normally handled automatically by most Linux distributions. We also wont be covering the newly released readeonhd driver as these are still in an early stage.

Licensing Issues

ATI/AMD provide their own license for their driver. You will need to read and accept this license before proceeding.

Notes

We will be using 'nano' as our text editor of choice but you can use whatever you wish.

While this guide is mainly focused to laptop users there isn't any difference for desktop users.

Prerequisites

You should run a full update for your installation to ensure you have all the latest packages installed.

Installing the ATI driver

The fglrx driver is not included with CentOS/RHEL so we will need to use a 3rd party repository. Here we will be using the yjl-livna repository.

1. Load up a terminal window if you are in the graphic interface.
2. Switch to the root user by entering the command "su -" (without the quotes) and typing in your root password
3. Edit the file /etc/yum.conf. Using nano we type the command "nano -w /etc/yum.conf"
4. If you have already configured yum to use the yjl-livna repository then append "*fglrx* *livna*" to the end of the "includepkgs" line and skip the next setup. Otherwise continue on.
5. Add the following to the bottom of this file:

6. Save the file. In nano you press Ctrl-X, answer yes to the "Save modified buffer" question and then press enter on the file name to write.
7. If you have not previously setup Livna execute the following command:

8. Now execute the following command:

9. Reboot your system and you will be using the fglrx driver.

Troubleshooting

Normally after installing the fglrx driver with the steps above your xorg.conf file should have automatically been updates to use the newer driver. If this did not happen or for some reason it has reverted then, as root, enter the following command:

This will switch you back to the fglrx driver.