CentOS 7 on an HP MicroServer N36L with an AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5430

I have an aging N36L box I use at home as a file server on our internal network.

Today a yum update in CentOS7 (it has not been updated for a long time so there were a lot of packages) caused the graphics to be corrupt/crash (machine was fine in text only mode).

I tried a few different things:

  • the latest mainline kernel from elrepo.org)
  • Fedora 29 (which rebooted immediately after logging into GNOME and had lots of graphical corruption in XFCE
  • Eventually downloaded CentOS7.3 from the archive and reinstalled using that. It’s a terrible work-around (and I didn’t keep logs or error messages). I used software RAID 1 with LVM on top.

Really this post is just to remind me what my dirty hack was if I need to do it again. I ought to collect logs and diagnostics of the problem and report it upstream.