{"id":1047,"date":"2008-11-25T04:17:29","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T12:17:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=1047"},"modified":"2009-09-25T22:45:26","modified_gmt":"2009-09-26T06:45:26","slug":"catalyst-catastrophe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=1047","title":{"rendered":"Catalyst Catastrophe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yester-day, I installed version 8.11 of the <abbr title=\"Array Technologies Incorporated\">ATI<\/abbr> Catalyst&trade; Linux Graphics Driver on my <abbr title=\"Red Hat Enterprise Linux\">RHEL<\/abbr> 5.2 system.  When I later booted to Linux after restarting the computer, the <abbr title=\"graphic user interface\">GUI<\/abbr> was grossly dysfunctional.  What it displayed was little more than a few simple rectangles &mdash; no text, no icons, an a largish square for the mouse-cursor.<\/p> <p>It took me some time to get at a solution, but I present it here for the sake of anyone in a similar fix.<\/p> <p>The problem seems to have been with <code>\/etc\/X11\/xorg.conf<\/code>, configured for my system when it was running an earlier version of the software, and simply <em>renaming<\/em> 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 <code>\/etc\/X11\/xorg.conf<\/code> created anew by version 8.10).<\/p> <p>Because the <abbr title=\"graphic user interface\">GUI<\/abbr> wasn't really usable, I booted an <abbr title=\"Red Hat Enterprise Linux\">RHEL<\/abbr> installation <abbr title=\"compact disc\">CD<\/abbr>, entering <blockquote><code>linux rescue text<\/code><\/blockquote> at the <q><code>boot:<\/code><\/q> prompt; this gave me a Linux <abbr title=\"command-line interface\">CLI<\/abbr> session that could access the Linux partition on the <abbr title=\"hard disc\">HD<\/abbr>.  I had the Linux partition mounted as <q><code>\/mnt\/sysimage<\/code><\/q>; that put <code>xorg.conf<\/code> at <code>\/mnt\/sysimage\/etc\/X11\/xorg.conf<\/code>, whence it could be <code>mv<\/code>'d.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yester-day, I installed version 8.11 of the ATI Catalyst&trade; 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 &mdash; no text, no icons, an a largish square for the mouse-cursor. [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,5,4],"tags":[295,453,72,454,140,143,142],"class_list":["post-1047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information-technology","category-personal","category-public","tag-ati","tag-catalyst","tag-linux","tag-radeon","tag-red-hat","tag-redhat","tag-rhel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}