This isn't directly a HC issue, but I'm hoping someone can make sense of it that is more familiar with the ATI drivers than myself.
I picked up some cheap GPUs and was going to benchmark them with some other cheap hardware I picked up. Not having a spare HDD I decided I would just do a full distro install on a flash drive and since I already had Live Kali 1.1.0a flash drive laying around I figured I would use it to install Kali as a full install on an empty flash drive.
There is a guide on how to install Catalyst on Kali, but it uses packages and it doesn't reference the driver version, so I didn't want to waste my time cluttering up the drive with packages with it likely being the 14.9 drivers.
Instead I just ran the commands referenced in the wiki here to fetch and install Catalyst. It all went mostly good, and even though it said the driver was installed successfully it also said check the log for errors.
The error was it failed to build fglrx against DKMS. I could be mistaken, but I thought DKMS is not explicitly required for it run.
So I go ahead and do:
aticonfig --adapter=all --initial -f
reboot
Instead of bringing up the Kali (gnome based) login it goes straight to console now. So I deleted the xorg.conf it created and rebooted.
The gnome desktop starts up as it should now, but when I:
aticonfig --adapter=all --odgt
It tells me that it is not configured, run aticonfig --initial.
I do that (knowing when I reboot it won't start the gnome desktop), and checkout the file and it all looks right and detected all 3 GPUs.
I then try to get the temp again and it tells me the X server is not running. Clearly this isn't the case since I'm using a gnome desktop X has to be running. Just for grins when I /usr/sbin/Xorg it tells me the Server is already active on display 0.
When I run fgl_glxgears I'm only getting 95 frames per second on the animation, so something is wrong there also.
fglrxinfo tells me my display is :0.0 and screen is 0.
I tried exporting the DISPLAY variable with ":0", ":0.0" "0", etc as well to prevent the error.
Oh... I almost forgot... when installing Catalyst it seems to overwrite libGL.so.1 with the 32 bit version even though it detects my arch as 64. I believe this might be why the installs fails with DKMS based on the logs.
After installing Catalyst if I run fglrxinfo I get an error about that lib having ELFCLASS32. I have to fix it by reinstalling libgl1-mesa-glx
and run ldconfig
After doing those two things fglrxinfo works.
While I'm at it, does anyone know of a setup guide working Kali 1.1.0 for installing Catalyst 14.9 (oclHC compatible)? Installing working packages would probably be quicker to deploy than trying to troubleshoot this. But seeing as there probably isn't since I couldn't find one if anyone has some tips on how to Xorg.conf to run the desktop and aticonfig doesn't think X is running that would great.
I could probably save some heartache by installing a different distro but there are reasons why I need it running under Kali long term than just it being something I already had on hand.