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Using the Radeon 370 on a Lenovo Thinkpad E560 with Mageia 5

PostPosted: May 3rd, '16, 22:54
by gukin
This isn't a question, rather just a post for anyone else who has a E560 and wants to use their Radeon 370 video card.

First, Mageia 5 installs fine on the E560 but once rebooted it doesn't see either the wired or wireless NICs. To get around this, on another computer, go to your favorite Mageia repository such as ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/Mageia and go to ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/mageia/distrib ... e/updates/ and download kernel-firmware-20150722-1.mga5.noarch.rpm, kernel-desktop-4.1.15-2.mga5-1-1.mga5.x86_64.rpm (or the latest kernel), then pop over to ../../nonfree/updates and get rtlwifi-firmware-20151018-1.mga5.nonfree.noarch.rpm, put them on a flash drive, then plug the drive into your E560 and install the kernel and firmware (cd /run/media/. . . /) rpm -ivh *.rpm, then reboot.

At this point you should have both wireless and wired network, if you only have wired, then plug in a wire, set up your repositories and update your system.

Now the good bit, how to bring up the Radeon 370:

Using XFdrake, select ATI, then Radeon HD 6400 and later, when it asks you if you want to use the proprietary driver, click on yes, let it set up all the fglrx stuff and reboot.

You'll get a blank screen and be terribly disappointed, but here is the magic trick that makes it all work:

Log in as root and run "aticonfig --initial",

Then run "service dm restart" and you've got your Radeon 370 and it will be the default card until you reconfigure your X-server to go back to the Skylake integrated. One thing: by going this route switcharoo is disabled so you'll have to go back to XFdrake and reboot to get back to Skylake.

It does use a bit more power but Skylake is not completely supported in Linux 4.1, nor are all OpenGL extensions in Mesa 10.5.

If you've read this far, either you've got an E560 or think I'm nuts, I just wanted to publish a fix for the Radeon 370 problem in a sensible forum. This problem bothered me for longer than I would have liked so if you do have an E560, enjoy your other video card.

Re: Using the Radeon 370 on a Lenovo Thinkpad E560 with Mage

PostPosted: May 4th, '16, 17:19
by doktor5000
Thanks for sharing, changed it into a sticky.

Re: Using the Radeon 370 on a Lenovo Thinkpad E560 with Mage

PostPosted: Jun 2nd, '16, 16:03
by gukin
One more thing to add, once you've gotten your rig set up with fglrx and have amdcccle installed, you can easily swap back and forth between the skylake integrated GPU and the discrete R7 370 GPU by doing this:

xhost +

sudo amdcccle

Then pick "Switchable Graphics" and pick the GPU you wish to use; you'll need to reboot after swapping GPUs.