Death To Proprietary Drivers

I was working on a CentOS 6 install for work and figured "hey, I should upgrade Mustang to the latest version." Normally this means

yum upgrade
shutdown -r now

Of course that didn't work; Mustang has an APU and uses a proprietary driver from AMD for X.org. I pretty much never use Mustang's console so I didn't notice this for 2 days, when my wife complained about not being able to watch Lost.

After much futzing, I find the error message: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so: undefined symbol: GlxInitVisuals2D. This means AMD's driver is doing something stupid. I of course can't compile it nor fix it. I tried to download the latest driver, but that refused to install. Curse swear, google google and then I found it.

rpm -ivh http://elrepo.org/linux/elrepo/el6/x86_64/RPMS/elrepo-release-6-6.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm
rpm -e fglrx64_p_i_c-12.104-1 --nodeps
yum -y install fglrx-x11-drv-32bit fglrx-x11-drv kmod-fglrx
aticonfig --initial

First line installs ELRepo, which you might already have. Second line removes the previous drivers, which conflict with the new ones. The --nodeps is because Adobe really wants OpenGL installed. Third line is the important one, it installs the new drivers and does all the magic to get them working. Yes, the X.org driver needs to install a kernel module. Last line just makes sure that Xorg.conf is set up properly. I'd been playing around in it to try to get it to work.

So Death to Proprietary Drivers! And long live the guys at ELRepo!