ATI Graphics Cards and Jaunty: What Works?

[Jackelope King]

I'd like to do an upgrade to Jaunty Jackalope, but in light of the problems I've been hearing about folks using older ATI cards no longer having access to a working driver, I wasn't sure whether or not I'd be able to make the upgrade. So for anyone who knows about this problem, any clarification about specifics? What do I need to do to determine whether or not my graphics card is going to give me heartburn trying to install Jaunty?

[oldrocker99]

My laptop, which I got 12/08, has an ATI X1200, which is no longer supported by the newest drivers .

However, the 9.01 drivers (still available on the ATI site) DO work as far as 2D display goes, but no OpenGL. The 9.04 drivers don't work at all with my ancient card.

Not exactly solved, but a workable stopgap until either ATI or the open-source developers get something for these cards that DOESN'T use the incompatible fglrx drivers.

[Jackelope King]

My machine is running an ATI Mobility Radeon X700. According to ATI's website, the "ATI Catalyst™ 9.4 Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver" is compatible with my card, but I don't know if this is sufficient for me to upgrade to Jaunty. It's getting down around exam time my way, so I don't have a day to spare upgrading and then downgrading. Hence my reason for seeking out info first

[cljbville]

I have an IBM Thinkpad R51 with an ATI Mobile Radeon card. After my upgrade to Jaunty, xorg messed up big time, like what others have been describing. However I got lucky and found a solution!

After messing around with trying to enable graphic effects on previous versions I came to the conculsion the flgrx driver was no good for me. I checked my laptop after the Jaunty upgrade and found the xorg-driver-flgrx package was back. So even though it wasn't referenced in my xorg.conf I took it out and it works fine now.

When the laptop was booting I hit ESC and went in to the recovery option. On the menu I selected the root shell. I then removed the xorg-driver-flgrx. Now I can get in fine just like before the upgrade! I've never been able to get the 3D graphics to work on any version, but it still looks great even with out the effects.

Here's the command to remove the flgrx driver: "apt-get remove xorg-driver-flgrx"

Here's my xorg.conf file too, I left out all the comments to keep it short:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Option "UseFBDev" "true"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

[ALIENDUDE5300]

No luck getting X1950 Pro Graphics Card to work Dunno if it's supported by ATI anymore -- when I bought it, it was the VERY best card ATI sold, and I expected it to last me longer than 2 years... as an ATI customer I am very disappointed with the lack of drivers, and I'm seriously thinking about buying an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT GPU, because at least NVIDIA has drivers that support most, if not all of their cards under linux, and the open source drivers are much better than ATI's. Unfortunately, unlike ATI, NVIDIA does not openly release the technical specifications of their drivers, but if they did, I'm sure that the open soure drivers would be any better, and I rarely hear of NVIDIA cards breaking (I had an ATI X1900 GT that broke -- the fan stopped working, and then it overheated while it was out of warranty).

[cutterjohn]

ATI announced this a while back, R500 and below are deprecated for support in catalyst, so you were originally stuck with the OSS drivers. OTOH I read somewhere the other day that ATI relented and is providing SOME support for older cards with legacy cat releases but they apparently don't support Xserver 1.6 right now. No idea how serious ATI is about this.

Windows drivers moved to legacy support too, but in that case in means less frequent driver updates.

R600 and above are fully supported by monthly cats, as far as that goes... (I feel like a freaking alpha tester...)

[anystupidname]

I don't think I've EVER gotten fglrx to work on this "laptop" (more of a desktop replacement from ASUS) since dapper. Jaunty didn't disappoint me. I can only use the radeon driver. ATI radeon mobility X700 and tried 9.4 and 9.3 driver. Perhaps the strange screen size 1440x900 has something to do with it I donno... Every time I weird colors at the top of the screen and have to reboot. Can't Ctrl-Alt-Backspace or switch to another console...

[wolfdale]

I have a HD4850 card and the latest two version of fglrx did work, however I was more impressed with xorg's "radeon" driver which comes standard with Jaunty. Three items that were most concerning to me:

1) Video playback - Radeon now supports xv playback for my card and there is absolutely no video tearing as seen with fglrx.

2) Power saver mode works in radeon for my Samsung T220 LCD screen. I could never get this to work using fglrx.

3) Radeon still doesn't support 3D for my card, which means i have to boot into windows to play games. However, I hear 3D is coming to radeon. Also, this prevents me from using compiz.

Two out of 3 ain't bad, I personally think it's enough to stay with Jaunty.

[Mark Phelps]

Ok, everyone's experience is different, but I've had to resort to using the open source drivers in Jaunty because I have one of the "blacklisted" cards and -- I've been pleasantly surprised by how well these drivers work!

I don't do gaming or other really demanding 3D stuff, but with videos and Youtube, there is no more tearing or stuttering like there was in previous Ubuntu releases. Plus, can even have compiz turned on -- and this is WITHOUT using the fglrx driver.

[pme 72]

The open source drivers in 8.10 worked better for me than the proprietary ones in 8.04 first with Radeon Xpress 200 integrated graphics and later with an inexpensive x1550 upgrade. I never felt a need to install proprietary drivers for 8.10. The upgrade to 9.04 was easy. Compiz seems smoother than with 8.10. Videos look great. I spend a lot of time reading the forums and was aware of the support changes from ATI. After reading so many threads about driver issues it is a relief to have working open source drivers that upgrade so seamlessly. Count me thankful...