ATI Radeon HD 5400 driver installation problems

**propercoil** · August 6th, 2012

I'm trying to install a driver for my graphic card on 12.04.
when i go to "System Test" it says "VESA graphic not in use" and System-> Hardware says the graphic driver is "unknown".
invoking "lspci | grep VGA" gives:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Manhattan [Mobility Radeon HD 5400 Series]

I followed the suggestions of this work-through trying to install with "Additional Drivers". it did install and said the driver is active but after rebooting and invoking "fglrxinfo" i got multiple errors:

X Error of failed request: BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation)
Major opcode of failed request: 136 (GLX)
Minor opcode of failed request: 19 (X_GLXQueryServerString)
Serial number of failed request: 12
Current serial number in output stream: 12

tried to use the suggestions from this thread with no luck.

I then tried to install the propriety driver from amd following this tutorial but nothing works and when rebooting you get a message saying ubuntu running on low graphics, catalyst crashes every time. now i'm stuck trying to uninstall fglrx with the errors:

sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx fglrx_* fglrx-amdcccle* fglrx-dev* xorg-driver-fglrx

[sudo] password for propercoil: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done Virtual packages like 'xorg-driver-fglrx' can't be removed E: Unable to locate package fglrx_8.980-0ubuntu1_i386.deb E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'fglrx_8.980-0ubuntu1_i386.deb' E: Unable to locate package fglrx- amdcccle_8.980-0ubuntu1_i386.deb E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'fglrx- amdcccle_8.980-0ubuntu1_i386.deb' E: Unable to locate package fglrx-dev_8.980- 0ubuntu1_i386.deb E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'fglrx-dev_8.980-0ubuntu1_i386.deb'

I have spent over 15 hours total trying to resolve this, i'm about to hang the towel and go back to windows. i love the flexibility ubuntu has being a web dev but this is crazy. if only i had a remedy to the ati nonsense. i think i'm just frustrated?