Catalyst woes

Question

Installed latest catalyst 8.6 today and I am having big problems. Running AMD 780G IGP. X starts only as root, immediately shutdowns for normal users. Even for root there seems to be a problem. glxgears and fgl_glxgears work fine but glxinfo and fglrxinfo segfault. Output of fglrxinfo:-
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics
OpenGL version string: 2.1.7659 Release
Segmentation fault
And a similar error for glxinfo. Here is xorg.conf:-
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Simple Layout"
Screen 0 "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection
Section "Files"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/misc"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/TTF"
EndSection
Section "Module"
Load "glx"
Load "dri"
Load "dbe"
SubSection "extmod"
Option "omit xfree86-dga"
EndSubSection
Load "freetype"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard1"
Driver "kbd"
Option "AutoRepeat" "500 30"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc103"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "Auto" # Auto detect
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0"
Option "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver"
Option "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor"
Option "DPMS" "true"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
Driver "fglrx"
BusID "PCI:1:5:0"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0"
Device "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
Monitor "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection
Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "false"
EndSection

Answer 1

I doubt it is hardware related as my pc is just a month hold. Furthermore, doom 3 seems to work fine and I am getting 36 FPS at 800x600 High quality. Everything seems to work perfectly in windows xp and as I said before, doom 3 is slightly faster in Arch than in xp! I did a memtest and the memory is alright. I have no clue how to check whether the integrated HD 3200 is working properly.  As I really have a lot of time to kill, I did some extensive distribution testing. Here are the results:-
OpenSuse 11 kde3 with catalyst 8.5- Everything works perfect but if you leave the computer idle for some time(say downloading) it may completely lock up. This does not happen if I am using the comp even for hours at a stretch. You will have to leave it idle and the locking up is completely random. i think it has something to do with acpi but no such problem with other distros so I am dumping suse. Btw, kde4 in suse is just awesome. Even if you install just kde3 a lot of packages will be from kde4(ktorrent, games)
Fedora 9:- They bundle the next version of xorg and catalyst cannot be installed you downgrade xserver. Not worth the effort, so I skipped it. radeonhd driver actually worked in this one but the screen had huge black borders all around.
mandriva 2008.1 kde- This one is strange, the driver version with mandriva is 8.471. doom 3 works but the sound is delayed. Some times the delay is as much as 5 secs. Exceptionally irritating.
Zenwalk 5.2- Really funny, I cannot install the drivers. There is no package available in the zenwalk repo and installing the driver manually or generating a slackware package both give me an error about GPL incompatibility or something.
Tommorow I will try ubuntu 8.04.
So it boils down the following:-
1. My HD 3200 is spooked.
2. catalyst 8.6/8.5 is spooked.
3. Someday up there does not like me.