Ok, lots of testing today, i'll try to make it brief.
Clean install #1 of xubuntu 12.10 64bit w/ amd catalyst 13.3 beta -- 2x HD7850 gpu's
Bitminter - would not detect any opencl gpu's
cgminer - detected both gpu's, ran each gpu at approx 300Mh/s using poclbm kernel, could not change some O/C settings even though they were withing the default ranges detected for the cards. Vddc could not be changed at all, memclock could not be lowered beyond 900mhz
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Clean install #2 of xubuntu 12.10 64bit w/ amd catalyst 13.1 -- 2x HD7850 gpu's
Bitminter - would not detect any opencl gpu's
cgminer - detected both gpu's, ran each gpu at approx 300Mh/s using poclbm kernel, could not change some O/C settings even though they were withing the default ranges detected for the cards. Vddc could not be changed at all, memclock could not be lowered beyond 900mhz
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Clean install #3 of xubuntu 12.10 64bit w/ fglrx driver from ubuntu repository -- 2x HD7850 gpu's
Bitminter - detect 1 opencl gpu -- runs 320Mh/s with O/C from AMDOverdriveCtrl
cgminer - detected both gpu's, ran each gpu at approx 155Mh/s using poclbm kernel, could not change some O/C settings even though they were withing the default ranges detected for the cards. Vddc could not be changed at all, memclock could not be lowered beyond 900mhz
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Clean install #4 of xubuntu 12.10 64bit w/ fglrx-updates driver from ubuntu repository -- 2x HD7850 gpu's
Bitminter - detect 1 opencl gpu -- runs 320Mh/s with O/C from AMDOverdriveCtrl
cgminer - detected both gpu's, ran each gpu at approx 155Mh/s using poclbm kernel, could not change some O/C settings even though they were withing the default ranges detected for the cards. Vddc could not be changed at all, memclock could not be lowered beyond 900mhz
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Clean install #5 of xubuntu 13.04 beta 64bit w/ fglrx-updates driver from ubuntu repository -- 2x HD7850 gpu's
installed Python-pyopencl from ubuntu repository. According to a ubuntu bug report this package was broken in 12.10 and will not install. this is fixed in 13.04
Bitminter - detect 2 opencl gpu -- runs each gpu 310Mh/s with O/C from AMDOverdriveCtrl still tweaking...
cgminer - detected both gpu's, ran each gpu at approx 300Mh/s using poclbm kernel, haven't tried O/C settings yet.
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Bitminter finally works like i wanted it to, not sure if it was because of the lack of a working python-pyopencl package or other changes to 13.04.
i'll have to test the O/C settings in cgminer to see if they work correctly as well.
bottom line.... use xubuntu 13.04 64bit , fglrx-updates, fglrx-amdcccle-updates and fglrx-updates-dev from the repositories, install python-pyopencl?
Thank you to a couple of gentelmen who made suggestions in this thread.