Activating fglrx driver

[reydempto]

Hi,

Every time i try to "Activate" the ATI driver in System>Administration>Hardware Drivers, I get a pop up window saying:

"You are not authorized to perform this action."

how can i give myself the authority to perform such actions??

[reydempto]

-BUMP-

Anyone have any suggestions?

[reydempto]

-Christmas Bump-

[taurus]

Are you the original user that you created during the installation? What's the output of this command from a terminal?


id

[reydempto]

Are you the original user that you created during the installation? What's the output of this command from a terminal?


id


uid=1000(reydempto) gid=1000(reydempto) groups=4(adm),20(dialout),21(fax),
24(cdrom),26(tape),29(audio),30(dip),44(video),46( plugdev),104(scanner),106(fuse),
108(lpadmin),114(netdev),123(admin),124(sambashare ),1000(reydempto)

[daveball]

I have the exact same problem with Ubuntu 8.10 and get the same error message.

I upgraded my very, very old AGP graphics card to an HD4350 (my motherboard is one with AGP and PCIe slots).

I then tried to enable the proprietary ATI drivers in System->Administration->Hardware Drivers and hit this problem.

In the end I downloaded the driver direct from ATIs website http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux64/linux64-radeon.html. Its a straightforward self-extracting installer thingy. At the command-line in the folder you downloaded the driver too, just run:

sudo ati-driver-installer-8-12-x86.x86_64.run

Then you'll need to reboot. ATI say if X fails to start up then you should enter this command at the terminal session (I didn't have to do this):

aticonfig --intial -f


Its all running fine now, except that if I set System->Preferences->Appearance->Visual Effects to "Extra" some screensavers (the OpenGL ones I think) and other applications flicker very badly. Keep Visual Effects at "Normal" or "None" and all is fine though.

If it doesn't work and you need to uninstall the ATI driver it's just:

cd /usr/share/ati/
sudo sh ./fglrx-uninstall.sh


I also found out the hard way - if for any reason you mess up your X settings and run the usual life-save command "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" this will disable the fglrx driver. I probably should have used the aticonfig command above instead.