ati driver 8.42.3 upgrade botches gdm [solved]

[gr0x0rd]

Yesterday I thought I'd try running emerge -uDv world and updating the various packages on my system. I let the emerge run and walked away. When I got back to my system X was no longer responding. After ctrl-alt-backspace my system locked up. On the next boot gdm was unable to start, with the following error:

/usr/bin/gdm: error while loading shared libraries: libGL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

a quick search found this was because of a wrong SONAME in the ati driver package. The bug is known and a workaround is posted at

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199633

Okay, great. I've read the bug report and understand it. The workaround/fixes seem simple enough but... how do I make these changes? I tried creating the symlinks manually, that didn't work. I copied the code into a file and tried to run it using

patch -p1 < opengl.patch

which just asks me what file to patch. I probably just dont know what commands to use, and these are just assumed and common knowledge to people who are familiar with linux... which I am not.

Can someone please explain how I can apply these workarounds and get my desktop back?

Cheers,
_________________
~g
emerge -FML...

[gr0x0rd]

Creating a symlink from libGL.so.1 to libGL.so fixed the problem. As for the patch, I'll just wait for the next version...
_________________
~g
emerge -FML...