On 02/23/2013 01:24 AM, Mark Stodola wrote:
> On 02/22/2013 10:14 AM, Eva Myers wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 09:40:23AM -0600, Mark Stodola wrote:
>>> On 02/22/2013 04:53 AM, Eva Myers wrote:
>>>> I have a problem with the new Firefox 17 on SL5 machines with ATI
>>>> Radeon X300 graphics cards using the fglrx driver. The X server will
>>>> frequently crash when a user attempts to start Firefox, leaving the
>>>> computer with its screen black and unresponsive to mouse or keyboard
>>>> (the Xorg process just sits there eating CPU). Does anyone know a fix
>>>> for this problem?
>>>> Eva.
>>>
>>> This sounds more like a problem with fglrx, are you using the one from
>>> ELrepo? I'm still on FF 10ESR here, but under Options/Preferences (they
>>> keep changing it I swear!), in the advanced section, general tab, you
>>> can uncheck hardware acceleration. See if that alleviates the problem.
>>> It may be useful to check your Xorg log files for clues as well.
>>
>> I downloaded fglrx from
>> http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Legacy/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.12&lang=English

Make sure you rebuild and reinstall the fglrx module with each kernel 
upgrade. AMD's Catalyst is a from-source builder, so whenever the kernel 
headers change your driver module can fall out of sync with the 
installed version of the kernel.

If your problem persists, uninstall fglrx and see if Firefox works in an 
unaccelerated environment -- it is possible that X is crashing because 
of something unrelated to drivers. If things seem to work unaccelerated, 
then try playing with the Firefox acceleration setting as recommended 
above. There may be media codecs Firefox thinks can be handed off to the 
GPU that actually can't (either because the driver isn't capable or 
because the codec itself is dirty/immature and fails).

Are there any other graphically accelerated programs you can test your 
driver against to discover if it is a system-wide problem or really 
Firefox specific?