Karmic ATI Driver

[Penguin Guy]

Just upgraded to Karmic, after the upgrade has finished it tells me that the driver doesn't work. It won't let me run Compiz or anything graphics-intensive like that.

Two questions:

How do I fix it?
Why did it break in the first place?


Really ****** off with these Linux graphics issues every time I upgrade.
Thanks for the help.

EDIT: Looks like I was running the old kernel.

[lidex]

Not a whole lot to go on there. How about the output of this command:

lspci -nn | grep VGA

Did you try jockey (hardware drivers) and or try to install proprietary one? What version?

[Mark Phelps]

Just upgraded to Karmic, after the upgrade has finished it tells me that the driver doesn't work. It won't let me run Compiz or anything graphics-intensive like that.

Two questions:

How do I fix it?
Why did it break in the first place?


Really ****** off with these Linux graphics issues every time I upgrade.
Thanks for the help.

Every major version upgrade installs a new kernel version, and the restricted drivers are kernel version specific. So, if you're running the restricted drivers, you will have to upgrade them every time you upgrade Ubuntu versions.

[markbuntu]

Umm.. actually your safest bet would be to uninstall any proprietary driver before upgrading.

That said, you need to uninstall the old driver


If you are using a driver that you downloaded from the ati site and installed it using the installer there is a removal script that you can use:


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



If you installed the driver using Jockey (hardware manager) then that means the driver is from the Ubuntu repository and has been packaged a little differently so you will need to remove it as follows (you may also need to use this method if you used dpkg to build and install the driver):


sudo apt-get purge xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-kernel-source xorg-driver-fglrx-dev

The driver also may replace the following files with proprietary versions so you may need to restore them to their generic state:


sudo apt-get --reinstall install libgl1-mesa-glx xserver-xorg-core


If you use Envy to install the driver, use Envy and chose remove completely.

Reboot into recovery kernel and use the fix-x option or "repair broken packages" to get to the generic VESA driver working. You can verify that the VESA driver is in use by checking in /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

Then you can use hardware driver to install the driver or get the latest one from ati and install that instead.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

[Penguin Guy]

Sorry, looks like I was running the old kernel. Now I've updated grub to run the new one everything seems to be working fine.

Thanks.