eggfriedrice.com

This is one of those “blog it so I can find it again” posts (much like that entirely unfascinating post on disabling Magic Quotes which I still search for when I have that irritation. See, blogging is useful after all!). This might also be useful for someone else so I’ll list the steps I took.

This post is about making an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 in my old Toshiba M30X laptop work with Ubuntu 8.04. I just freshly installed Hardy Heron on the Tosh and found that the graphics driver is many times more screwy than it ever used to be. It worked fine with Gutsy Gibbon (which loaded a reasonable driver and correctly autodetected the panel resolution) but with Hardy I was instantly boned.

When booting the Hardy live CD to the live desktop the picture became a scrambled mess as soon as it hit GDM, which makes it fairly safe to assume the graphics driver is wonky. It installed fine using the “Safe Graphics Mode” option (hit F4 from the boot prompt for more options) and xorg defaulted to the vesa driver (which worked but at the wrong resolution).

After much faffing I’ve discovered that the open source Radeon driver doesn’t seem to work particularly well at the moment (launchpad has a few bug reports about it). The solution: go closed source (hmm, yes, that sucks).

I installed the ATI binary driver using the following steps (adapted from here):

• Make sure the ATI driver package is installed (it was already for me): At a terminal run sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
• If the package wasn’t already installed, run this to load the module: sudo depmod -a
• Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and replace Driver “vesa” with Driver “fglrx”
• Run sudo aticonfig --inital -f to set up xorg.conf
• Restart xorg (log out then kill X with [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[Backspace] (brutal but effective))
• Hope everything works out nicely

It seems to have worked here but we’ll see just how stable it is…