Beli’s blog

Sometimes there is a need for installing proprietary graphic driver, and utterly easiest way is to install a package from YaST or other package manager. However, when new distro comes out, and you install it right away, packaged driver is not yet available. Some time must pass until proprietary packages appears. So, we must go “hard way” of installing graphic drivers by hand.

Way I am going to describe is fairly easy and it’s how global administrator of openSUSE forum does it for himself. His nickname is “OldCpu” and he hold my great respect. Some text below will be his words. Before I write a procedure of installation, I must mention that there is very easy script that does this automatically. You may find it here: Easy install of ATI proprietary driver in the console.

Ok, open your terminal or Konsole and let’s go… (type “su” and password when requested as we need root access)
*** note: proprietary ATI driver is called “fglrx”

Prerequisites: gcc, make, kernel source and kernel syms must be installed on the system.
Let’s check:

rpm -qa '*kernel*'

So assuming that is all ok, then go get the proprietary driver by going to the ATI web site and download it to a location on your hard drive where you can find it (say /home/username ) . Lets say you end up getting the binary executable file “ati-driver-installer-11-2-x86.x86_64.run”.

Now, we must check if we already have fglrx installed. If we do, we must uninstall it or installing new one over it will break your system (well, to a newbie, sure, repairable to expert) .
Let’s check:

rpm -qa '*fglrx*'

if fglrx is found, must be removed (say it is called “fglrx64_7_5_0_SUSE113″ ):

rpm -e fglrx64_7_5_0_SUSE113

Now you need to go to runlevel 3, which is pure text mode. There are two ways to do it:
1. type: “init 3″ without quotes and press enter
2. (probably better) reboot, and when boot menu apears, just type “init 3″ (without quotes)
***NOTE: you won’t have graphics and mouseclicks.. just text and typing.

when in text mode, login and come to the place where you downloaded ATI driver, and type

sh ./ati-driver-installer-11-2-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg SuSE/SUSE113-AMD64

***note: file name can be different as ATI updates it. Also, if you have 32-bit processor, change AMD64 to IA32

That may be slow in parts so have patience ! … and if that runs successfully it will ceate an rpm file. I do NOT know what that file will be called with your hardware, so I will make up a name. Lets say it created the file “fglrx64_xpic_SUSE113-8.821-1.x86_64.rpm”

to install it, run

zypper in fglrx64_xpic_SUSE113-8.821-1.x86_64.rpm

after done, personally I prefer to run one more command, but should work without it:

aticonfig --initial

Finally, reboot

shutdown -r now