9.10 Upgrade + ATI Driver install?

[ngrieb]

I made the upgrade to 9.10 (very nice), but there are no ATI drivers available through the distro it seems. I went to the ATI website and found a Linux driver for i386 and i686 (combo/bundle). When I try and install it, however, it seems to think either I have an i686, or the shell policy is preventing install? I get this error:

Error: ./default_policy.sh does not support version
default:v2:i686:lib::none:2.6.31-14-generic; make sure that the version is being
correctly set by --iscurrentdistro

Everything I have read in the installation manual points to the fact that it should work...but there is no troubleshooting part of it (yay ATI :confused:. I hear that the newer ATI drivers are at least better at handling compiz at least.)

Can anyone help me with this?

[Mark Phelps]

What ATI video card/chipset do you have? Unless it's one of the newer HD 3x/4x/5x models, there are NO ATI drivers that will work with your model and Ubuntu 9.04 or newer. Forcing an install of these newer drivers will only corrupt your display and you'll have to boot into a console to remove them and replace them with open source drivers.

[ngrieb]

Aww really? WTF ATI? It's an older chipset ... ATI Radeon X1650.
So what can I not run then?
I seem to have run TrueCombat and everything else fine...even compiz (but it seemed to seriously slowing things down so I turned it off).

[Mark Phelps]

Aww really? WTF ATI? It's an older chipset ... ATI Radeon X1650

Yeah -- sorry. Know it's no consolation, but I have the very same chipset on my home desktop CP and, like you, am relegated to using the open source drivers.

However, I find that for 2D graphics (YouTube, videos, DVDs), the open source drivers works pretty well. It's failing is that it provides only minimal 3D acceleration. Supposedly, the driver is being improved for 9.10 -- but since I haven't upgraded yet, I can't attest to that.

[ngrieb]

I can't even find open source drivers. Where would they be?

[Mark Phelps]

I can't even find open source drivers. Where would they be?

Ubuntu installs them by default. If you're able to boot into a graphical desktop, the drivers are already installed.

They're obtained from packages that can be seen via Synaptic. The particular package (ati/radeon/radeonhd) depends on the model video card/chip you have.

[chiefrocka]

ngrieb, did you ever get your x1650 to work? I have Karmic 64bit and it didn't automatically detect the video card and install the appropriate ati packages. The result being that the screen was garbled, and all I could make it out was a square blob which was the mouse pointer.

I switched back to my integrated video card and installed all of the applicable ati packages from the ubuntu repo (i'm not sure what exactly was applicable).

I then reverted back to the x1650 and everything looked good, until I noticed that scrolling any gui component was not refreshing correctly. I.e. it was only refreshing the first 5% of the screen. Hard to explain, but if you have this problem, I hope I made sense.

Anybody know which packages *should* be installed for this kind of video card? Also, are there any differences for the 64bit version of the OS? And hopefully, does anyone know of any status updates for ati proprietary drivers being supported? (ngrieb, i get the same error you did when I tried the proprietary drivers, why is that? New X, new kernel?

[chiefrocka]

_

[ngrieb]

Ya, my card works fine, but I don't have a 64-bit system...sorry. Did you install from scratch or upgrade?

[a__l__a__n]

I recently managed to install the ATI drivers for my ATI Radeon X1600 under Ubuntu 9.04 (64-bit), using the instructions here:

http://tan-com.com/posts/technology/fix-ubuntu-904-ati-driver-issue

Presumably something similar can be done under Ubuntu 9.10.

I'm currently contemplating whether to attempt the upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10, so I'd be interested to know if this works in 9.10.

[darkod]

I had an issue with my integrated HD3200 with clean install of 9.10 64bit. It turned out to be video driver.

Look at my post #2 here, that worked for me.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1324497

Cheers.