Links to learn linux for noobs

Hi … Ive been trying to get the AMDGPU driver to load instead of the Radeon driver using various versions of Pop-os (19.04/10 & 20.04/10 ) using either a R9 290 (Sea Islands GCN2) & now a R9 280 (Volcanic Islands GCN1) and have never had any success - just a black screen and lots of frustration.

I have only been using Pop for just over a year as my main driver but every time I have issue with it I have to rely on help from other people or guides.

Some guides tell me almost every thing I need to know, but do not explain the precise instructions on how to do it … eg

Im trying to do this bit

  • When building or compiling a [kernel]

CONFIG_DRM_AMDGPU_SI=Y and/or CONFIG_DRM_AMDGPU_CIK=Y

  • should be be set in the config.

but I have no idea on how to actually do that :frowning:

If I look for ubuntu help sites I tend to get 100+ guides that all do it slightly different from the others … which in turn doesn’t teach me anything cos im so confused as to which method to use and most of the time do not work or just break my system even more.

Posting in forums tends to get to get the same results … 20 different ways of doing things, telling me that it does work and im doing it wrong or people asking me why I doing this, of which I would have thought the answer is pretty obvious - because I dont know and I am new to this, hence the post :expressionless: e.g https://linustechtips.com/topic/1297979-have-i-missed-anything-out-amdgpu-vs-kernel-58-issues-pop-2010/

Ive come to the realization that I just gonna have to learn this myself and hope for the best or just forget about linux and move back to win10 ( I really would prefer not to do this as Pop runs was better than Win10 in every way apart from trying to get the AMDGPU driver to work ironically )

Is there a website out there that provides stupid people like myself a basic way of understanding what programs/modules work and how to access problems yourself with certain methods?

Everytime I enter a input such as "glxinfo | grep “OpenGL renderer” or “dmesg” I can figure out what it is ment to do from the output it gives … But where the hell do u learn these things from? When I search “learn unbutu or popOS or linux” … again Im provided with a million pages that all tell you how to do the “same” things in different ways and where as I can see this being useful to know, for a noob like me, its just an information overload.

When I have fixed things in the past, it just feels like Ive applied a band-aid … I have no real understanding of what I just did and thats prob not good if I plan to continue using linux, its got to change.

Thx for reading

Generally speaking: People tend to explain the easy things, the things they could do instantly, even if woken in the middle of the night, in a comprehensive and understandable manner. However, when it comes to the rougher stuff, they fail miserably.

The reason for that is the “iceberg principle”: In order to explain something well, you have to know about 10 times more about the subject than what you are going to tell. When people who answer questions or write tutorials go near the limit of their knowledge, they lose the ability to communicate properly.

That’s why you will find a thousand excellent tutorials about how to open a command shell and type in a command, but hardly anything about: How to build and install your own kernel. In 20 years I have done it exactly thrice, the last time almost a decade ago. Anything, I could tell you, would probably be faulty and way to complicated, so I prefer to abstain.

I don’t have a specific solution to your problem, possibly there isn’t one: I have a Radeon graphics card from 2011. It works fine all the time out of the box. However, some time ago, I tried to install a professional video editing program which demanded specialized AMDGPU drivers. The latest drivers available for this piece of hardware are from 2014 and they just don’t work with modern installations.

So, I’m going to stick with Kdenlive. I’m not a professional in that area anyway.

You might think: Linux sucks because of the driver issues, but this problem isn’t limited to Linux. On my previous PC I still had Windows XP in parallel with Linux and I had an Intel onboard GPU. When XP had almost reached its final end of life, I switched to Windows 10.

What happened?

My Belkin WiFi adapter was no longer recognized, and I had to buy a new one.
Many programs complained about missing Windows 10 drivers for the GPU and refused to start. Until today (2021), neither Microsoft nor Intel have provided one. Fuck them!

This was the very moment when I decided not to use Windows any more, not even for the couple of programs which I like and have no proper equivalent in Linux.

1 Like

A post was split to a new topic: First Steps into Linux

Hi Mina and thx for the reply & the link you provided, its helpful.

In the end I jumped ship and installed Manjaro of which im glad to say ive managed to get vulkan running and my Os is 98% complete now.

I like you … dont like windows anymore, so its kind of imperative that I learn how to fix issues within
whatever linux distro I use.

all the best

1 Like