Ubuntu Hardy Installation Guide

For most users it won't be necessary to go into installation and configuration details of the driver. Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) 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. If this does not provide the optimal solution you were looking for, please read ahead.

After installation, in GNOME or Kubuntu, turn off visual effects or you will notice a flicker in OpenGL.

Method 1: Install the driver the Ubuntu Way

This will install the current driver in Ubuntu's repository. It is older than the one AMD has released, but will be supported by the Ubuntu people. Catalyst 8.3 is in the repositories.

Terminal Command

$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-generic restricted-manager $ sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx $ sudo depmod -a

The second line may not be necessary as you may already have restricted modules installed. Run it just in case. If the third line fails, you probably don't have the restricted repository enabled. See Pre-Installation.

After this, you may need to edit Xorg.conf:

Terminal Command

$ sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

In the device section, if it is not already there add:

File: /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Driver "fglrx"

Then to make sure Xorg is set up correctly, you'll have to let aticonfig "initialize" it:

Terminal Command

$ sudo aticonfig --initial -f

After this you should be able to restart your computer and have the driver working. To test type

Terminal Command

$ fglrxinfo

into a terminal. If the vendor string is not ATI, but Mesa, check #Removing Mesa drivers

Post-Installation Tweaks

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

File: /etc/X11/xorg.conf

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.

On newer cards the options below enables Visual Effects and video to be played without flicker. The Textured video option can be turned on, but this can cause flicker or diagonal artifacts when playing videos.

File: /etc/X11/xorg.conf

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

At last some rationality in our little detbae.

Specific Issues

The answer of an exrpet. Good to hear from you.

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

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

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

Resume from suspend failed when using dual monitor configuration in xorg.conf. E.g. when using

aticonfig --initial=dual-head --screen-layout=right

Switching back to a single monitor configuration and restarting the xserver (though not beautiful) solves this.

Error! This module/version combo is already installed

Simply uninstall the previous version before installing the new one with

sudo dkms remove -m fglrx -v 8.522 --all