On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 2:44 AM, zxq9 <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>        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.

... Or head for elrepo.org and install kmod-fglrx :

http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-fglrx

It survives kernel updates transparently, so there is no need to
rebuild/install each time you update the kernel. Also, 'yum update'
will update the version of the ATI driver when a new version of the
driver becomes available.

Basically, it a 'install once and forget forever' type operation. :-)

In Scientific Linux 6, setting up ELRepo is as easy as:

yum install elrepo-release

Akemi