Making Ubuntu Hardy Heron work with a Radeon 9600
May 9th, 2008This 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 -fto 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…
The ’sudo depmod -a’ doesn’t seem to work for me as nothing happens. Am i just being a noob?
- Katy @ 28 May 2008You’re a noob!
If it’s working it should just ponder for a bit and then exit without printing anything. Don’t worry!
It’s one of those old school Unix programs that doesn’t print anything unless something didn’t work or you ask nicely.
Just carry on from there and see how the rest works out.
I’ve not had much luck with the rest of this installation of Hardy, I’m still not convinced by the graphics driver. Hope you have better luck!
- Al @ 28 May 2008Yes, i was not overly pleased as much as I thought I would be. The 3d mode in the chess game also does not work properly even after getting some of the packages needed, but I don’t play chess that often anyway:). The firefox beta is also now not compatible with any widgets or themes but I guess that’ll be fixed once it is out of beta and everyone updates.
I’ve also found that since increasing the visual effects, the computer sometimes just randomly freezes and the screen goes black, do you know whether this is also the graphics card, as I didn’t get it with gutsy.
- Katy @ 29 May 2008thanks for the credits for my blog post. I’m glad it helps you. Is it stable?
- GunbladeIV @ 31 December 2008