ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5450

[shutin]

For your second "error"... The instructions in the wiki are for a headless server. You aren't meant to login to X, you aren't even meant to have a monitor attached to the system.

Well that makes sense epixoip. Where I got confused (besides trying to do it with a monitor) was when I bailed out of X, thinking maybe that was the issue. Then I ran these lines:

ps -ef | grep X                   ## should show that X is running
 ^^ it did (still)

clinfo                            ## should show all GPUs + CPU
^^ i think this failed saying you have to be IN X for this to work. So I was convinced you had to get a graphical setup going.

[epixoip]

If clinfo failed then you probably didn't have the appropriate environment variables set correctly. Maybe you dropped them in .bashrc but hadn't yet sourced that file.