AMD Catalyst Control Center doesn't work

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Wed, 12 Mar 2014 09:11:01 -0400
Paul Cartwright <pbcartwright at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have googled & read all I could find, with no apparent solution in
> sight. I have a Dell desktop with a Radeon HD 5670 video card :
> lspci|grep VGA
> 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
> [AMD/ATI] Redwood XT [Radeon HD 5670/5690/5730]
> 
> I installed the amd catalyst via the file:
> amd-catalyst-13.12-linux-x86.x86_64.run.

Catalyst driver mostly does not support Fedora, and more often than not
it just doesn't work. Uninstall it, and use the default open-source
radeon driver (see below).

> my xorg.conf file shows this:
> ection "Device"
>     Identifier  "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
>     Driver      "fglrx"

You want the Driver option to be "radeon". Or better yet, rename/remove
your xorg.conf file and let X configure itself automatically.

<rant>
ATI is known to have a notoriously lousy support for Linux in general
and Fedora in particular. For their low-end and oldish cards,
they provide specs on which the Linux community has built the
open-source radeon driver (which works well). For their high-end cards,
they refuse to provide specs (so no open-source driver), while their
closed-source catalyst (fglrx) driver is a miserable POS that is almost
never up-to-date with the latest kernel and X.

In contrast, nVidia does not give away the specs for their cards, but
their closed-source driver simply Just Works(tm). Also, recently nVidia
folks decided to provide some (limited) specs to the open-source nouveau
devs, so there seems to be some light at the end of that tunnel... ;-)
</rant>

IOW, forget catalyst and use the radeon driver. And if radeon driver
doesn't work for your card, you are out of luck.

HTH, :-)
Marko