Last Saturday, I bought a new netbook and tried to install Fedora 20 on it. It was quite an interesting experience, if I had to describe it in two words, I would call the entire experience pure horror. I installed Fedora quite some times, I stopped counting after the 5th install

I fucked up the couple of first installations by using an usb stick which I previously used to install Lubuntu and I didn’t see any harm in NOT wiping the usb stick clean first I just  re-used it with Fedora usb creator. I am not going to bore you with the details, but let’s just say I have learned that when creating a bootable usb stick, I should wipe it clean first

When I finally managed to install Fedora 20, I noticed it was slow, it would freeze especially during multi tasking, and eventually I would get a black screen that would last 20 seconds. The culprit being my Radeon HD 8280 videocard

I managed to solve the problem, and of course I am sharing my solution with you

The usual screenshots are missing, I didn’t dare to take them while solving the problem. I was too afraid my system would freeze. Before you do this “how to” make sure your system is updated! (You do this by typing “yum update” in terminal).

Here we go:

Go to this site and download the drivers.

(Yes, I know you can use the “wget” command instead. But when I used it, I couldn’t see when the file was finished downloading and therefore couldn’t unzip the file because it probably wasn’t finished downloading.)

After the file has finished downloading move it to your home directory (in my case it was /home/roja/) so it looks like this.

Why you ask? Well it is just to make your life easier, as from now on you only have to copy and paste the following commands

Fire up terminal. Log in as root, you do this by typing:

su

After you have typed your password, type:

unzip amd-catalyst-13.12-linux-x86.x86_64.zip

Then type this:

chmod a+x amd-catalyst-13.12-linux-x86.x86_64.run

Now type this:

yum install gcc binutils make kernel-devel kernel-headers

When this process is finished type:

./amd-catalyst-13.12-linux-x86.x86_64.run

The drivers will be installed, at some point an installation wizard will appear, you can click on “agree”. When asked choose “automatic installation”.

When the installation was finished I got an error report, I chose to ignore it Then a window popped saying I had to reboot, which I did. After the reboot, Fedora was fast as lightening and the black screens were gone

(Remember, you can always do the cliccie for a larger piccie )