[GTALUG] Fedora 22 Live Workstation Install - no fglrx - no pdftk

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Russell Reiter <rreiter91 at gmail.com>

| I recently acquired another older MB, ASUStek M3A78-EM, Athlon 64 X2
| Dual-Core, 4Gb ram & onboard Radeon

Coincidentally, my mail lives on a machine with that motherboard.  I'm
ssh'ed into it to read and write mail.  It's running CentOS 6.  I
don't do anything much involving its X server (it appears to work).

| and I thought I'd give the latest
| Fedora Live a try. It installed well enough and Gnome pretty much
| worked except for the lack of fglrx in the open source drivers.

Just to be clear, fglrx isn't open source.  So it cannot be in Fedora.

The normal way to add AMD Catalyst proprietary drivers is to through
the <http://rpmfusion.org/> repos.  There are many guides to this on
the web.  I never do this because the open source drivers for AMD are
good enough for things I do.

| In
| fact KDE Plasma doesn't work at all.

I'm surprised.  That ought to be fixable.  Perhaps it requires
experts.

| In the Gnome desktop however, any intensive video apps such as VLC etc
| overheat the CPU and crash the unit.

That's a hardware problem.  No software you run on a PC should be able
to "overheat the CPU and crash the unit".

That hardware problem is likely to afflict you with a bunch of
different workloads.

| It looks like I'd have to
| backport X in order to install the proprietary Catalyst drivers for
| this particular GPU.

What do you mean by "backport X"?  What X is newer than Fedora's?  Why
do you think that it would solve your problems?

| HTML 5 videos on the net do work, but eventually
| the unit overheats and dies. I switched to lightDM and that's a little
| better but still not up to speed.

Overheating ought to be fixed.  In hardware.

Consider cleaning out dust as a first step.  Among other things, look
at heat sinks and fans.

Consider updating firmware (in case thermal throttling has changed).
I don't actually know if this is meaningful, but dmidecode on my
machine reports
	BIOS Revision: 8.14
The Asus site has M3A78-EM BIOS 2701 released 2010/11/12.
I'm pretty sure that that is what I'm running.

If brave, see if one of the heat sinks no longer connects properly.
Finding out can be destructive, so I don't recommend this unless you
are daring and experienced.  And have thermal paste to replace the
existing solution.  (AMD CPUs came with a disk of stuff instead of
paste and it is supposed to be single-use: detaching and re-attaching
a heat sink is not intended to work.)

| It seems that yum has been dandified for this release

"Dandified"???  "Gone" is the more accurate word.  Or is this word
play: DaNdiFied?

| but when I tried
| the new dnf update it failed to connect to the repositories. However,
| yum-deprecated did update the kernel and after that update dnf was
| able to function as intended.

That's odd.  And interesting.  Hard to say what actually was going on
now that the phenomenon is gone.  It's good that the problem is
eliminated.

Good luck.