AMD Catalyst 11.3 Drops Support For Old X.Org

With the month ending, Linux users were beginning to wonder where is this month's proprietary driver update, but AMD's web team has just uploaded the Catalyst 11.3 binary Linux driver. What's changed though in this month's update? Read on to find out.

While the Catalyst 11.3 file is available for download, release notes have not yet been published, but they're usually lacking anyways as far as detailed changes go. However, I have the scoop for you what's to be found in this Catalyst 11.3 / fglrx 8.83 driver update. This isn't a particularly exciting feature release (you'll have to wait for that), but there are some prominent changes worth noting.

For anyone still using X.Org 6.8, support for the very old monolithic X has been dropped. Not many people are still on X11R6.8, but for those that are the Catalyst support has been wiped away, and for everyone else this means a slightly smaller driver package (we're down to around 70MB) due to stripping away these binaries. Also being ripped out is fglrx_xgamma and its associated libraries/headers and the libfglrx_ip.a has been unified across all GCC versions.

Catalyst 11.3 provides "early look" support for openSUSE 11.4 users. Plus various other distribution packaging scripts have been updated.

Some of the fixes in this release include corruption/black screens when display hot-plugging, Big Desktop mode fix, X not starting on laptops with AMD discrete and IGPs, desktop corruption with RandR 1.3 transformations, and an X Server segmentation fault.

That's about it for this month's AMD Catalyst Linux driver update.