Installing The AMD Catalyst Driver On Fedora 21

Written by Michael Larabel in Fedora on 2 January 2015 at 08:52 PM EST. 26 Comments
FEDORA
Installing the AMD Catalyst (fglrx) driver on the latest Fedora release can sometimes be a challenge due to Fedora catering towards the open-source graphics drivers.

With Fedora being on the bleeding-edge and not caring much about proprietary software support while the open-source graphics drivers continue to evolve, sometimes it can be a bit of a headache installing the AMD Catalyst/fglrx driver on the newest Fedora release, but generally it's possible.

For those that have upgraded to Fedora 21 since its release last month, you can get the latest Catalyst 14.12 binary blob working.

The open-source AMD Linux graphics driver advanced a lot in 2014 and is closer to performance parity, but if that doesn't cut it and you want to use the proprietary driver, there's a new guide courtesy of Red Hat intern Levente Kurusa.

Levente Kurusa has posted to his blog a guide for setting up the Catalyst driver on Fedora 21. You need to download the RHEL7 AMD driver package, enable DKMS support, use aticonfig to generate a config file, make some modifications to the fglrx_drv.so file, make some modifications to libglx.so, setting some environment variables so GNOME's Clutter will recognize the OpenGL driver, optionally switch over to lightdm instead of GDM, and then reboot. It's not trivial installing Catalyst on Fedora 21, but it's possible, at least for now until the xorg-server or Linux kernel is upgraded and the ABI breaks again (as it's still generally being a few month turnaround time for AMD to support new kernel and xorg-server interfaces).
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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