DM Cinnamon and Gnome fail to load

[HitmanNumber86]

I was running Cinnamon, as usual. I had done a --dist-upgrade and installed an "AMD Catalyst driver" (ver. 12.4), during the session, to try and get my CPU fan to start regulating tempurature properly. My friend went to a fresh login, and Cinnamon failed to load entirely, though it appears as though X was still operating. The windows would open, without any frames. I couldn't select any of them, over others. There were no panels to click. Everything was f***ed. I tried rebooting and logging into my profile, and the same thing happened to me, with both Cinnamon and Gnome.

I tried booting to previous kernels. 3.0.0-16 would load the DE, with the wrong resolution, but 3.0.0-17 would react the same. I'm currently running 3.0.0-19. I've tried purging and reinstalling Cinnamon, with no results. I tried fixing broken packages, but no errors were found. I want to remove the AMD driver, but it came in a .run and I'm not sure how, other then delete the directory, and I'm not sure what damage it might do.

I'm currently running MATE, which seems to be running fine. The only thing I can think of, if removing the driver directory doesn't work, is to reinstall the '/' partition.

[esteban1uy]

From "AMD CatalystTM Installer Notes for Linux":

Uninstalling the AMD Catalyst Proprietary Driver

1-Launch the Terminal Application/Window.

2-With superuser permissions, enter the command "aticonfig --uninstall".
Note: Alternatively, uninstall can be launched with superuser permissions using the following commands as well

Code: Select all

sh ati-driver-installer-x86.x86_64.run --uninstall
sh /usr/share/ati/amd-uninstall.sh

3-If the above command is not supported, then an error message “Uninstaller for AMD Catalyst TM Proprietary driver, /usr/share/ati/amd-uninstall.sh, does not exist or cannot be found” is displayed.
Use that operating system’s package management (RPM, APT, etc.) software to remove the AMD Catalyst proprietary driver.
In order to restore the system to the previous state before the last installation, the original configuration file needs to be restored manually. Without that, Xorg may fail to start properly after uninstalling the driver and rebooting the system.
To restore the original Xorg configuration file:
-Locate backup configuration files: ls /etc/X11/xorg.conf.original-*
-Take the latest version with the highest number and copy it over the existing xorg.conf file: cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.original-<number> /etc/X11/xorg.conf
After that it is safe to reboot the system and it will start up using the open-source driver that ships with the OS.

4-Reboot your system.
You have now successfully uninstalled the AMD Catalyst proprietary driver for Linux.

[HitmanNumber86]

Thank you esteban1uy!!! Problem solved. I still gotta figure out this case fan issue, though.

[esteban1uy]

Glad to have been of help.
Remember to mark the topic of the thread as "solved".