ATI Catalyst™ 9.11 Driver on CentOS 5.4

Tried to install ATI Catalyst™ 9.11 Driver on CentOS 5.4 with the Integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphics in the motherboard GA-MA785GT-UD3H (rev. 1.0).

1st try failed.
looking at the error log at
/usr/share/ati/fglrx-install.log

Turns out that I need to install the kernel headers before I install this driver.
installed the header rpm for 2.6.18-164.6.1.el5-x86_64
and it works fine now.
Yet to benchmark it though.
will try this soon

256 MB  Radeon HD 4200

[15:06:33 ~]$ glxgears
13524 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2704.076 FPS
14208 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2841.537 FPS
18396 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3679.084 FPS
18753 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3750.495 FPS
15337 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3066.924 FPS
18235 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3646.986 FPS
18245 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3648.970 FPS

[15:07:58 ~]$ /usr/bin/fgl_glxgears
Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
2983 frames in 5.0 seconds = 596.600 FPS
4220 frames in 5.0 seconds = 844.000 FPS
4225 frames in 5.0 seconds = 845.000 FPS
4213 frames in 5.0 seconds = 842.600 FPS
5879 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1175.800 FPS
6707 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1341.400 FPS
6278 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1255.600 FPS
6580 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1316.000 FPS

Booting Ubuntu off a USB thumb/hdd

Hands up for those who feel frustrated burning CDs of linux distros only to find out at boot that the burn went wrong and you have failed md5 checksums on the disc thereby restarting your installation process!

there's other stuff like haven't to reinstall all your favourite programs like gvim bioperl etc.. cos the liveCD doesn't contain them. 

Have always known that you can boot off a USB thumbdrive, so I found an old seagate 10 GB HDD (dun laugh! I finally found a use for it!!) plugged that in a USB casing,
followed the instructions in here for making a casper-rw for persistent file settings

downloaded the proprietary ATI drivers for my motherboard. and off I go in experimentation!
will update this post for my experience!
I hope CentOS will behave well in this manner! Not relishing the experience of having to burn another failed DVD


UPDATE: Darn Gigabyte MA785GT-UD3H refuses to boot from my USB HDD nor my 2 GB  thumb!
the bios recog the HDD, and thumb
for the former it just hangs there.
the latter gave a boot error with no specifics!
no idea why!