Ubuntu Intrepid Installation Guide

= Installation Guide for Ubuntu Intrepid (v 8.10) =

The alternatives
ATI has had a poor track-record when it comes to Linux support. There are too many stories about black screens, hours of configuring X, installing drivers, angrily (and ineffectively) editing configuration files, and sitting dumbfounded in front of the computer.

AMD has traditionally been a bit more Linux-friendly, so after AMD bought ATI, a slight hope has arisen that in the future there might be better drivers for ATI-cards on Linux.

However, creating better drivers takes some time, so while the people at AMD are doing their thing, people with ATI cards basically have these options:
 * 1) Use the open source drivers. These are stable and nice, but currently they have poor 3D-performance, if any. If that's not a problem, they are the Right Choice&trade;.
 * 2) Use the restricted-driver management system that comes with Ubuntu to install the drivers (envy/jockey/"restricted" packages).
 * 3) Install the proprietary drivers as made available by AMD.
 * 4) Install the drivers manually. This should be your last resort, and may not even work.

Very true! Makes a chagne to see someone spell it out like that. :)

= Installing the restricted drivers "the Ubuntu way" =

Restricted Drivers Manager
For most users it won't be necessary to go into installation and configuration details of the driver. Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) provides a notification saying that there are restricted drivers available. You just have to go there (Restricted Drivers Manager) and enable the "ATI accelerated graphics driver". Ubuntu will then install and configure the driver for you.

Post-Installation Tweaks
To enable hardware accelerated video on pre-R500 cards, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to include the following lines without [...]

Section "Device" [...]	Driver		"fglrx" Option		"VideoOverlay"	"on" Option		"OpenGLOverlay"	"off" [...] EndSection

Note that when Visual Effects (Compiz) are active, flickering and artifacts may occur in OpenGL applications and hardware accelerated video windows (particularly with R300 chipset). To prevent this, disable Visual Effects.

= Installing the proprietary drivers "the ATI way" = Download the Cataylst AMD driver file and run the installer. People that have not had luck with the first two choices have had success with this.

Note: A number of cards, some of which were marketed quite recently, are currently in ATI's legacy pipeline. Download the final version of the drivers (9.3) for these cards here.

Alright alright alright that's exactly what I nedeed!

= Issues =

Mesa drivers
If fglrxinfo reports that Indirect rendering by Mesa is in place, even though you have installed ATI driver, you might want to remove Mesa:


 * Remove the package xserver-xgl.
 * sudo apt-get remove xserver-xgl
 * Explanation: If you installed this previously in order to make compiz work, it will not allow direct rendering on your display. You can check out if this is what it causing the problem by running
 * DISPLAY=:0 glxinfo | grep render
 * If it returns an ATI renderer, it means that xgl is being displayed indirectly on the display 1. (Taken from )


 * Warning: This might make your compiz stop working as it is configured to use XGL. A solution might be to run the Envy script in order to configure compiz. Or, if Compiz stopped working due to "Composite" problem, check that the following is set in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Extensions" Option		"Composite"	"Enable" EndSection


 * Check for AGP and DRI errors in /var/log/Xorg.0.log like these are:
 * (EE) fglrx(0): [agp] unable to acquire AGP, error -1023
 * (EE) fglrx(0): cannot init AGP
 * (EE) fglrx(0): atiddxDriScreenInit failed, GPS not been initialized.
 * (WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization failed!                 *


 * If you have Intel 8285P and E7205 chipsets and AGP not detected then you have to remove the i82875p_edac module and restart a some others:

rmmod i82875p_edac rmmod fglrx rmmod intel-agp rmmod agpgart modprobe agpgart modprobe intel-agp modprobe fglrx


 * Blacklist the modules e7xxx_edac so it doesn't start up again when booting - add the following line at the beginning of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:
 * blacklist i82875p_edac


 * This has been known to fix issues with -Mesa -AGP -DRI -Google earth and -suspend to RAM (s2ram).


 * Explanation: http://openwetware.org/wiki/Computing/Linux/Ubuntu


 * Check you are running the correct kernel.
 * Explanation: If you're upgrading from Gutsy to Hardy in some instances the Grub bootloader does not get updated and the new kernel is not loaded.
 * Run in a terminal:
 * uname -r
 * If the output starts with 2.6.22 or below you are not using the current kernel and the Ati drivers will not load properly.

If this doesn't help, try Ubuntu Gutsy Installation Guide, or other links:, ,.

Hang at logout
If you experience hangs when logging out (of X) it is probably due to the /etc/ati/authatieventsd.sh script looking for X authorisation files in the wrong place when it starts up. You can kill the hanging authatieventsd.sh processes from a console tty to allow the shutdown of the X server. This can be fixed permanently with:

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/xdm/authdir sudo ln -s /var/run/xauth /var/lib/xdm/authdir/authfiles

If that doesn't work then you can disable atieventsd with this command:

sudo /usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f atieventsd remove

Before the above commands verify that /etc/ati/authatieventsd.sh exists after build and install, if not just do : (assuming that the installer is in your home directory)

sh ati-driver-installer-8-12-x86.x86_64.run --extract driver

sudo cp ~/driver/packages/Ubuntu/dists/intrepid/replacements/authatieventsd.sh /etc/ati/authatieventsd.sh

(intrepid is to be replaced by the name used at the building stage (hardy,8.10,8.04,etc...)

sudo chmod +x /etc/ati/authatieventsd.sh

just reboot login and ctrl+alt+backspace to try

Suspend/Hibernation
Suspend hibernation works with the latest driver.

For ATI X1400, to get the laptop to wake up from suspend, I had to change the following in /etc/default/acpi-support:

SAVE_VBE_STATE=false

POST_VIDEO=false

ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=false

Comment: This is a little surprising, since the comments at the beginning of /etc/default/acpi-support seem to make it quite clear that those settings are ignored unless you add "acpi-support" to SUSPEND_METHODS. --Bewst 23:22, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

For Radeon 3200, to wake up from suspend, I had to add the following lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf: (This settings is not good option, if you are using compiz-fusion or any other transparency-based thingie. Not working for HD 3850)

Section "Extensions" Option       "Composite"        "Disable" EndSection

Section "ServerFlags" Option "AIGLX" "off" EndSection

A second Radeon 3200 suspend/wake issue seems to be related to the mouse/keyboard itself. Adding a reset to the kernel line of your grub configuration seems to solve this. In other words, update /boot/grub/menu.lst and add an i8042.reset:

kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-11-generic root=UUID=73293ec3-5ee4-418c-914 4-1457914fb284 ro quiet splash i8042.reset

Can't remove fglrx with dpkg
If dpkg really-really refuses to remove an older fglrx-package, it might be needed to edit /var/lib/dpkg/diversions and remove a few lines. This is a hack and should be avoided.

This module/version combo is already installed
If you get this error-message, simply uninstall the previous version before installing the new one with:

New kernel installed?
I found out that when getting a new kernel the fglrx kernel-module is not installed for your new kernel. You can do that by these simple steps:

AMD Control Center
You can start the AMD Control Center by typing:

If amdcccle doesn't work and says Identifier is not a valid word, this may be caused by some of the reasons below:

- Use lower case letter in xorg.conf.

- Make sure lines have no hard returns in them causing some parameters without their corresponding keywords are misinterpreted

- If amdcccle complains about some keyword in your xorg.conf and quits with a segmentation fault, you may just be working with a different xorg.conf than your system uses. I had a copy of some generic xorg.conf in my home directory, and amdcccle complained about stuff it couldn't cope with. You need to start amdcccle in your /etc/X11 directory.