Debian

General Status

• Included with Distribution
• Native Installer Support contributed by Aric Cyr
• Repackaged by Flavio Stanchina (currently out of date)

Installation

• Installation Guide (recommended for x86_64 users)

Another installation Guide:

• 3D Acceleration for your ATI card (works for SUSE, Mandriva and Debian x86. X86_64 users should not use).

• How to install AMD Catalyst package on 69xx series for x86_64 systems (Tested on Mint Debian 201012):

1. Download latest Catalyst release (currently 11.1)

$ cd Desktop; mkdir Catalyst; cd Catalyst/
$ wget http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-11-2-x86.x86_64.run

2. Now install the x86 packages required for Catalyst:

$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

3. Before continuing you need to remove the standard Radeon drivers:

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-radeon

4. Now navigate to the Catalyst folder on your desktop. Right click on the *.run file and click properties. Click the permissions tab and enable 'Allow executing file as program.' and click close. Now double click the *.run file. Choose to install the driver and customize any optional components you wish.

EDIT: STOP! I did not need to do any of the following steps below, in fact I did it once and I was unable to boot GDM3 unitl I deleted the xorg.conf file. The ATI installation will generate the correct xorg.conf for you.

5. Now you need to find your GPU controller name which you will use to generate a basic xorg.conf file. For example, my XFX 6970 shows up as 'ATI Technologies Inc Device 6718.'

$ lspci -v | grep VGA

6. Open a terminal and enter:

$ sudo gedit

7. In gedit enter (replacing the identifier shown with whatever was produced in the previous step):

$ Section "Device"
$  Identifier "ATI Technologies Inc Device 6718"
$  Driver "fglrx"
$ EndSection

Save the file as xorg.conf to etc/X11/ and restart the system.

8. You will have an 'AMD Unsupported Hardware' watermark in the lower right hand side of your screen when using cat 10.12. To remove this, create a text file on your desktop and enter:

$ #!/bin/sh
$ DRIVER=/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so
$ for x in $(objdump -d $DRIVER|awk '/call/&&/EnableLogo/{print "\\x"$2"\\x"$3"\\x"$4"\\x"$5"\\x"$6}'); do
$  sed -i "s/$x/\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90/g" $DRIVER
$ done

Save this file as watermark.

9. Open a terminal and enter:

$ cd Desktop
$ chmod 755 watermark
$ sudo ./watermark

Log out and log back in. The watermark should be gone and you're done.

Tips and Tricks

• To build your own .deb packages you will need to install at least the following packages from the apt repositories:
  • fakeroot
  • debhelper
  • build-essential
  • make
  • module-assistant
• Debian Help
• Debian Forums

Related Resources

• Debian wiki page refering ATI.

• Flavio Stanchina's ATI ancient Linux driver packages for Debian