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**caravel** · 09-24-2007, 13:06

After an entire weekend wasted trying to get the ATI proprietary driver and the fglrx driver to work in Ubuntu 7.04, I finally threw the towel in last night. I had finished reinstalling clean installing Windows XP at about 11pm then fired up VI and started an Irish campaign in order to chill out for a bit.

This is not an old issue, I had the same problems with other distros, including Mandriva and previous versions of Ubuntu, though I had eventually got it working, but only with the old Radeon 9000 Pro. The 9800 Pro I have now and the fglrx/ATI proprietary driver don't seem to get along. I've pretty much tried everything possible, and the Ubuntu forums are also pretty much stumped. The last answer I got was to the effect of "it happens". Apparently it may be a combination of driver, chipset, and graphics card. I may try again in the future but not before I get hold of an Nvidia graphics card. I don't have a problem with Linux as a whole (I find it much more preferable to windows), it is always the issue of ATI drivers that frustrates my efforts to fully get into it.

Have any other orgahs had similar problems or have gone back to windows for any other reasons (the obvious being that you can't run TW games on Linux)? I'm excluding dual boot from this as I've never seen the point in dual booting two operating systems.

**Husar** · 09-24-2007, 14:14

I think I already explained that I had similar issues trying to install ATI drivers in SuSe Linux.
For some reason they just didn't seem to want to work properly.

It's always my dad who wants to migrate to Linux and then gives up because this or that component isn't supported. Problems I remember were the ATI drivers, the TV card and sometimes getting the internet to work was problematic as well. Since I saw all these problems on my dad's PC and it even crashed there quite frequently when I tried some of the built-in games I actually never bothered with Linux at all.

I mean it was a bit interesting to explore it on someone else's PC but I prefer my own PC in a working condition.

**drone** · 09-24-2007, 17:50

The ATI Linux drivers have had issues, but recently AMD has been releasing specs, register maps, etc., and generally being more open to the Linux community. Hopefully there will be better drivers soon.

**Xiahou** · 09-24-2007, 20:15

Originally Posted by drone

The ATI Linux drivers have had issues, but recently AMD has been releasing specs, register maps, etc., and generally being more open to the Linux community. Hopefully there will be better drivers soon.

Yeah, hopefully that will be a major upside of ATI's acquisition. ATI has had a long and troubled past with the Linux community, with many still holding grudges against them.

My latest Linux install was on a PC with a 9600pro, and I had a terrible time getting the drivers installed so that I could run 3D games properly. I finally did manage it, but I don't remember exactly how... I'll have to see what I can dig up on the problem.

Edit: I think my problem had to do with trying to install the drivers via RPM- it flat didn't work. I then installed the drivers from ATI's site which "sorta" worked. I think I finally resolved the issue by uninstalling all the video drivers- which knocked me back to a command prompt -and then installing the ATI official drivers, which work fine. Needless to say, I won't be upgrading those drivers without a damn good reason.

**caravel** · 09-24-2007, 22:26

In my case the driver crashes the X server and the monitor blacks out. I've tried CTRL+ALT+Backspace at that point but to no avail. The only fix is to boot in recovery mode log in to the command line and edit the xorg.conf, changing "fglrx" in the device line back to "ati", this restores the xorg driver. I've been through the process of downloading the proprietary driver, building .deb packages from this, and installing from those, which produced the same result, installing via "sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx", after enabling the restricted repositaries, with the same result. I've followed the wiki: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubu...allation_Guide and that has also brought about the same result (though it is a good guide and did work for me and the 9000 Pro with Ubuntu Dapper. Eventually I had to give up and call it a day.

Hopefully AMD will improve the ATI Linux driver support, and hopefully ATI drivers overall will improve, as they have had a bad reputation as a whole in the past. For me though enough is enough and my next venture into Linux will be with an Nvidia graphics card.

**Blodrast** · 09-25-2007, 01:10

Never had ATI cards, but I've had my share of problems with video drivers for Nvidia cards, as well... Their installation script was buggy, so it didn't install properly, in the end I managed to get it working by a combination of running the script and manual interventions... kinda sucked. Don't remember what card it was.

**R'as al Ghul** · 09-25-2007, 10:24

I also have an ATI card and have tried ubuntu 7.? and openSuse recently. Something didn't went to well with ubuntu so I decided to give openSuse a chance again. One of the two, pretty certain it was opensuse, had a super simple installation procedure for the ATI driver. It worked almost like an .exe. No hassle with command lines etc.
My problem is, that even though I've MS truetype fonts imported to Suse and applied, I'm not able to configure all desktop fonts as I want and 1280*1024 is out of the question because you can hardly read anything.
So, I've an unfinished dualboot system and no real time to repair and customize it.

R'as

**Husar** · 09-25-2007, 13:37

Yes, installing them in SuSe was rather easy, but they had 3D acceleration turned off by default, the problem was getting that to run.

Though maybe it's better by now?

**caravel** · 10-06-2007, 13:01

It's the same, the "3d acceleration off" means that you're using the xorg ati driver and not the fglrx driver. As for me I will be on the look out for a decent used AGP Nvidia card, matching, or bettering, the performance of the Radeon 9800 Pro.