Fglrx

AMD Catalyst (previous fglrx: FireGL and Radeon for X ) is the proprietary graphics driver for AMD/ATI graphic cards. The open source alternative is radeon.

Hardware detection
To choose the right driver, first detect the graphics card. You can use lspci for this task:

If you have an AGP card, also detect the chipset supporting AGP:

Hardware support

 * Force legacy driver when you have Radeon HD 2000 - 4000:
 * Mask >=ati-drivers-13.1 and >=xorg-server-1.13:

Kernel
You need USB support. Also you need to activate the following kernel options:

If you have an AGP card, enable AGP support. If you want to use the ATI internal AGP support, you must enable kernel support as a module or not at all:

If you use a hybrid system with Intel integrated video card, you should also activite KMS and Intel driver. Make sure radeon is disable.

Driver
If you are using a hybrid system, enable intel driver but disable sna USE flag on it. See .

Check the USE flags of :

After setting this you want to update your system so the changes take effect:

acpid
Some cards need acpid running to handle events. See the ACPI article.

Initial setup
This will generate an initial xorg.conf to :

Copy the file to the default location:

This will modify an existing xorg.conf to use the fglrx driver with a single screen:

For dual-head configuration use this instead (where the second screen is [left|right|above|below]):

Set the OpenGL driver to use fglrx:

Permissions
If you have the USE flag acl enabled globally and are using ConsoleKit (i.e you're using a Desktop profile) permissions to video cards will be handled automatically. You can check the permissions using getfacl:

A broader solution is to add the user you want to be able to access the video card to the video group:

Note that you will still be able to run X without permission to the fglrx subsystem, but usually not with acceleration enabled.

Settings
The most comfortable way for most users is to use as a graphical UI to configure the driver.

Unexplained segmentation faults and kernel crashes
If you experience unexplained segmentation faults and kernel crashes with this driver and multi-threaded applications such as Wine set UseFastTLS in xorg.conf to either 0 or 1, but not 2.

X -configure fails with a no device found error
If X -configure fails, you must create a stub xorg.conf file:

Where "xxxx" is your card model (example: 7770 for HD7770). Name this file xorg.conf and place it in /etc/X11.

aticonfig fails with no suitable screens error
Create stub file as above, run aticonfig command again as:
 * 1) aticonfig --initial -f --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Trouble with integrated graphics (A8 or similar)
If you are having trouble getting an on chip integrated graphic core to work (strange visuals/black screen) you may want to double check your BIOS settings. In some cases it appears the 'auto' settings don't work correctly, so make sure to explicitly enable the integrated graphics. In my case (MSI A88XM-E45 motherboard):

Settings > Advanced > Integrated Graphics Configuration > Initiate Graphics Devices  - I changed this from 'auto' to 'Dual graphics'

Settings > Advanced > Integrated Graphics Configuration > Initiate Graphics Shared Memory - This then appeared which I gave a setting

After this all problems cleared up.

External resources

 * X.Org Wiki
 * Unofficial Wiki for the AMD Linux Driver - Gentoo Installation Guide