Mint

Hi people,

I experienced a problem after updating to 17.1. In Mint 16 the driver I got from AMD installed painlessly, but in 17.1 this was no longer the case. Nor did the standard fglrx and fglrx-updates work. The OS xserver-xorg-ati driver worked fine most of the time, but it gave artifacts (mangled characters in my browser and editors) and that got quite annoying after a while.

While googling for an answer on how to install AMD's driver this wiki continued to pop up so it probably will for other people too who are searching for a way to install the proprietary ATI / AMD / Catalyst / fglrx driver in Mint. And gives them a fighting chance to get on with their lives. This is how I did it. It might work for you, or it might not. Unfortunately I am not much of an expert in this field so I cannot help anyone with any specific problems ...

Prerequisites:

1) Linux Mint 17.1 with stock 3.13.0-37 kernel and the 3.13.0-37 kernel header files installed.

2) The Linux driver you can find on amd.com, in my case: amd-catalyst-omega-14.12-linux-run-installers.zip

Procedure:

Unzip amd-catalyst-omega-14.12-linux-run-installers.zip. This gives you a directory with a.o. the file amd-driver-installer-14.501.1003-x86.x86_64.run . Running this file directly did not work for me so I generated the Ubuntu .deb packages as follows. First you need to install some additional packages :

sudo apt-get install dh-modaliases xserver-xorg-dev execstack

Then you need to generate packages for Ubuntu Trusty:

./amd-driver-installer-14.501.1003-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/trusty

Fill in your sudo password when asked. This will take a few minutes. If all is well the installer comes back with:

Generating package: Ubuntu/trusty
Package /somewhere/fglrx-14.501.1003/fglrx-core_14.501-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb has been successfully generated
Package /somewhere/fglrx-14.501.1003/fglrx_14.501-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb has been successfully generated
Package /somewhere/fglrx-14.501.1003/fglrx-dev_14.501-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb has been successfully generated
Package /somewhere/fglrx-14.501.1003/fglrx-amdcccle_14.501-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb has been successfully generated

Now install the said packages:

sudo dpkg -i fglrx-core_14.501-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i fglrx_14.501-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i fglrx-dev_14.501-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i fglrx-amdcccle_14.501-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb

Then create an initial xorg.conf file:

sudo aticonfig --initial

Now you can check if all is well so far. Start Administration / Driver Manager and see if fglrx version 2:14.501-0ubuntu1 is selected.

Reboot. Mint came back with a mirrored screen with minimal resolution. I could adjust this with the standard Preferences / Display utility. Finally I experienced some tearing which I solved with the Catalyst control center:

sudo amdcccle

And there it was, Mint 17.1 with the latest & greatest Catalyst driver.

Finally: it is wise to make an emergency script to restore to stock xserver-xorg-ati at root prompt if things go wrong, just in case. I used this one:

#!/bin/bash
sudo sh /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh
sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx fglrx_* fglrx-amdcccle* fglrx-dev*
sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old
sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-core libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:amd64 libgl1-mesa-dri:amd64
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg