ATI Radeon HD 5450 not working

[SB9784]

Having used Jaunty on and off for a while now on my laptop, I decided to install a fresh build of Karmic on my new desktop PC. I've had a few problems with this (the most annoying being the WLAN card not working!) but most of them I've fixed now after trawling for answers in the forums, but this one I just can't solve ...

Karmic doesn't appear to handle my graphics card very well (in fact it's pretty dire): I can't set the resolution higher than 1280x1024 (which looks seriously ugly on a monitor with a native resolution of 1920x1080) and I can't turn on any desktop effects (I think because the drivers aren't supporting it). Here's the output of lspci:

$ lspci | grep -i '\<ati\>'
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 68f9
01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc Device aa68

If I go to Preferences->display I get the following message:

It appears that your graphics driver does not support the necessary extensions to use this tool. Do you want to use your graphics driver vendor's tool instead?

...and trying to use the proprietary tool gives this error:

snapshot1.png

... and trying to run aticonfig gives this:

$ sudo aticonfig --initial
aticonfig: No supported adapters detected

(I also get the same without the --initial option).

According to Administration->Hardware Drivers, my current active driver is a proprietary one called rt3090sta.

Many of the forums (fora?) I've seen on this sort of subject mention xorg.conf. I don't know anything about this file, except that I don't have one:

$ sudo find / -name 'xorg.conf'
$

Any ideas? I'm fresh out (not to mention really disappointed in my first impression of Karmic!).

[N92]

OK first what you need to do is go to ATI's site here.
Then once you have downloaded the driver open the folder that it is in.
Then open the terminal and type sudo nautilus you may need to type in your password.
next drag the file in the root folder.
Right click in the file then select permissions next click on the make executable box.
now double click on the file select run and follow the steps.

ps DO NOT ACTIVATE THE DRIVERS IN SYSTEM<ADMINISTRATION<HARDWARE DRIVERS!
this messes up the other driver you just installed.

Hope this helps

[Yellow Pasque]

Yeah, you'll need to install the Catalyst package from ATI's site, but since you just did a fresh install, I would recommend trying again, but using Lucid this time. The ATI proprietary driver that comes with Lucid is more current than anything offered to the general public.

According to Administration->Hardware Drivers, my current active driver is a proprietary one called rt3090sta.

That's a driver for a wireless device, not a video driver.

[SB9784]

Thanks for your replies - I downloaded the ATI Catalyst package as mentioned in the earlier posts and ran it from a terminal as root. After following the instructions I was prompted for a restart - and everything worked fine after that!

[xefyr]

I have the same card (same entries in lspci). I've downloaded the driver file as described but I'm presented with an error when running it:

ERROR: vcdk is missing. Installation aborted.

Is anyone familiar with this error and it's resolution? I've not found anything of interest from web searches.

Thanks.

[xefyr]

I found this post [1], translated it. I now have a working install of 9.10 with a radeon hd 5450 using the ati catalyst driver 10.3.

[1] http://forum.ubuntu-it.org/index.php...tml#msg1030020

[DrSkylaser]

I followed the steps in 2, but something went wrong. . . install-log says

[Error] Kernel Module : Failed to build fglrx-8.732 with DKMS
[Error] Kernel Module : Removing fglrx-8.732 from DKMS

so what d'I do now?

[petebarchetta]

Can anyone confirm this as working in 11.04 / 11.10?

[collisionystm]

Can anyone confirm this as working in 11.04 / 11.10?

Download a Live-CD and give it a shot.

There have been alot of Radeon HD problems but they will be sorted out in 12.04.

[ahallubuntu]

Can anyone confirm this as working in 11.04 / 11.10?

I recently picked up an HD 5450 (Asus card) for a home media server running Ubuntu 10.10 32 bit. It had previously been running an ATI 4350 card successfully using AMD's proprietary driver, and this same driver worked automatically for the 5450.

So I assume 11.04 will work for sure. 11.10? Maybe - with the 3.0 kernel who knows if the proprietary driver still works/has been updated/is even needed anymore?