On 05/24/2012 05:20 PM, Tanmoy Chatterjee wrote:
> Hello firends,
>
> I have facing a problem with another distribution - still one fact
> actually makes me amazed. Few days back my cousin bought a pc with
> configuration- [ AMD APU A8-3870k processor, Corsair Vengeance 4 GB
> RAM, ASUS Board].
> 1) I have tried booting an old linux distro - Ubuntu 9.04 - it boots
> into "intramfs" prompt.
>
> 2) Then tried booting SL6.1 LiveCD - it boots normally to the gnome
> desktop without a problem.
>
> 3) Tried booting Kubuntu 12.04 liveCD - its just turn "into a BLACK
> Screen of Death".
>
> My question if the problem is related with GPU driver - then why its
> not happening with SL6.1?
> Thanks in advance for any help.
Hi Tanmoy,
There are a few reasons for this, but I won't go into details here.
The basic reason is that Ubuntu and related distros depend on 3D
acceleration to run the desktop. They no longer have a graceful way of
giving you 2D desktop functionality and bundle 3D drivers with their
systems. But there are a lot of details that can be wrong about 3D
support. If 3D acceleration does not work, or if assumptions about
driver requirements or settings, or available hardware or kernel
features are not correct then X will fail on those distros. In the case
of Kubuntu it looks like it fails in a way that is particularly
unfriendly (but booting to a text shell instead of X should work if you
set the kernel arguments that way).
Scientific Linux does not require 3D acceleration to run the desktop,
and does not include 3D drivers for AMD hardware by default, so this
problem does not occur with a basic setup.
There is a remaining issue, however. An A8 processer has a very nice
graphics processor onboard and you aren't using it unless you build the
drivers from AMD against your current kernel. An A8 is so fast, though,
that under normal use you won't notice the difference, but there are a
lot of really cool little features that won't be enabled by default
(especially if you're a KDE user), and 3D games won't work.
A digression about the driver on SL6:
The annoying thing is that every time you update your kernel you'll need
to rebuild the drivers against the new kernel headers. The awesome part
is that the driver building process is mostly automated for you, AMD has
lately done a very nice job of maintaining its driver set for Linux,
games, CAD, and anything else graphical you want to do really fly on an
A8, and all this is free (both types of "free" -- AMD opensourced its
Linux drivers, so the Catalyst package is no longer "evil", or at least
not as evil as it once was).
I wrote a procedure for the E350 (with some background) that should work
fine on your A8 on the SL forums here:
http://scientificlinuxforum.org/index.php?showtopic=415&view=findpost&p=7102
Procedural notes for SL6 have also been added to the AMD driver wiki here:
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Scientific_Linux#Scientific_Linux_6x
The AMD release page is here:
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx
(if not you can select your type from http://support.amd.com )
Hope the explanation didn't confuse, and that the driver links are helpful.
-zxq9
PS: I normally don't cheerlead for hardware companies, but lately AMD
has been doing a good job of making graphics as painless and reliable as
possible on Linux. I'm as big a fan of Intel when it comes to SSDs --
but nothing else at the moment.
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