Yester-day, I installed version 8.11 of the ATI Catalyst™ Linux Graphics Driver on my RHEL 5.2 system. When I later booted to Linux after restarting the computer, the GUI was grossly dysfunctional. What it displayed was little more than a few simple rectangles — no text, no icons, an a largish square for the mouse-cursor.

It took me some time to get at a solution, but I present it here for the sake of anyone in a similar fix.

The problem seems to have been with /etc/X11/xorg.conf, configured for my system when it was running an earlier version of the software, and simply renaming this file is apparently sufficient to resolve the problem (though initially I reinstalled version 8.10 of the driver, and version 8.11 seemed not to have a problem with the version of /etc/X11/xorg.conf created anew by version 8.10).

Because the GUI wasn't really usable, I booted an RHEL installation CD, entering

linux rescue text

at the boot: prompt; this gave me a Linux CLI session that could access the Linux partition on the HD. I had the Linux partition mounted as /mnt/sysimage; that put xorg.conf at /mnt/sysimage/etc/X11/xorg.conf, whence it could be mv'd.

In the interval since I installed a new Linux driver for my AMD ATI video adapter, I have had fewer incidents of being logged-out when using Firefox, but there were still a few pages such that I would be logged out of my Linux session when I attempted to scroll through them with Firefox.

Yester-day or to-day, AMD ATI released a newer version of the driver, which seems to have resolved the remaining problem.

[Addendum (2008:08/27): Ah, I wrote too soon. The frequency of the problem has dropped further, but Firefox will still cause me to be logged out of the linux session when I scroll at least one of those pages.]

Yester-day or the day before that, AMD made available a new version of their Linux driver for the graphics adapter in my note-book computer. I was pleased, as I hoped that it would eliminated the logging-out problem that I've been having. (This problem did not go away when I up-dated my driver on 6 July.)

Well, things have changed with the new driver, but seemingly for the worse. I'm still logged-out when using Firefox with some webpages, but now the display ends-up blanked and effectively disabled, so that I have to completely restart the system. (Perhaps the frequency of being logged-out has been reduced.)

Oh well. I will hope that the next driver up-date resolves the problem.