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

[Russell Reiter]

Thanks Stewart and Hugh. I'll have a look at Stewart's recommendations
for pdf manipulation. Interestingly I forgot I had previously used
ImageMagic's "convert" to combine pages, perhaps I can also use it to
apply the page numbers as watermarks. I think I gave up on that the
last time, which was a couple of years ago, because I found pdftk
worked for this.

On 7/26/15, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh at mimosa.com> wrote:
> | From: Russell Reiter <rreiter91 at gmail.com>
>
<snip previous>
> Just to be clear, fglrx isn't open source.  So it cannot be in Fedora.

Sorry I should have said fglrx _as_ open source.

>
> 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.

I try to convince the people I assist that repository based systems
are the way to go. For this effort I had added rpmfusion and used the
recommended ATI install script but alas no joy.

>
> | In
> | fact KDE Plasma doesn't work at all.
>
> I'm surprised.  That ought to be fixable.  Perhaps it requires
> experts.

This might also be due to the fact that I switched to lightDM in an
effort, rightly or wrongly, to control the heating issue. I'll switch
back and give it a go after I improve the cooling.

>
> | 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?

Sorry - my poor semantics. I meant downgrade, apparently while there
is supposed support for these older GPU's in X 1.17 stepping down to
1.16 has apparently worked for some people as noted here.
https://bluehatrecord.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/installing-the-proprietary-amd-catalyst-15-5-fglrx-15-101-driver-on-fedora-22-with-linux-kernel-4-04/

>
> | 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.

Clean as a whistle, from a dust perspective. I have added one case
cooling fan to the back of the unit and I'll add another to the front
to increase throughput. :-)
Right now I'm directing the output of my Air Conditioner to the rear
of the unit. I get almost an hour of VLC video before the crash this
time.

>
> 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.

Thanks dmidecode shows this BIOS info for me.

	Vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
	Version: 0508
	Release Date: 08/14/2008

It looks like a bios upgrade is added to the TODO's

>
> If brave, see if one of the heat sinks no longer connects properly.

This was my "hail mary" option.

> 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.)

Thermal grease is on the list. God I hate that stuff, just a dab too
much and you defeat your whole purpose.

>
> | It seems that yum has been dandified for this release
>
> "Dandified"???  "Gone" is the more accurate word.  Or is this word
> play: DaNdiFied?

Yup, dnf = dandified yum.

>
> | 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.

Thanks I note that system rescue cd www.sysresccd.org/Download
gives me finer grained control over the display manager when running
off the cd, ie. more display resolution options and screen rotation.

There is an option for a disk install of system rescue cd as kind of a
kludge, or perhaps I'll try out Gentoo proper itself. I just used
system rescue's tool kit to shrink the partition in preparation for a
backup os.

First a bios upgrade tho.

Cheers
Russell

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