I have this theory that a lot of the reported problems are from failure to install the driver correctly. fglrx packaging doesn't seem too good and distribution maintainers often don't care enough to get it right. fglrx's opengl libs seem to overwrite the system libs (mesa), which isn't easy to reverse.
But if you make an effort to cleanly uninstall the old driver (including those pesky files in /etc!) before installing the new one, there really shouldn't be any black screens or failure to boot or anything drastic. At least I haven't had anything as serious as that, ever.
gentoo is really good in that regard. Not only will it keep track of all the installed files, it'll abort on collisions, it'll always install opengl libraries to a seperate location and use symlink-magic to use the ones you want (say: eselect opengl set ati or eselect opengl set xorg-x11).
good luck with your borrowed 5770, please tell us how it worked out
But if you make an effort to cleanly uninstall the old driver (including those pesky files in /etc!) before installing the new one, there really shouldn't be any black screens or failure to boot or anything drastic. At least I haven't had anything as serious as that, ever.
gentoo is really good in that regard. Not only will it keep track of all the installed files, it'll abort on collisions, it'll always install opengl libraries to a seperate location and use symlink-magic to use the ones you want (say: eselect opengl set ati or eselect opengl set xorg-x11).
good luck with your borrowed 5770, please tell us how it worked out
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