Installing Proprietary ATI Drivers in Ubuntu 8.10

Installing Proprietary ATI Drivers in Ubuntu 8.10 | Logical Insanity

( I used this article as a guideline to install ATI Catalyst Control Center on FoxU, a Ubuntu 8.10 machine, HL)

Because the s-video out of my Mobility Radeon 9600 wouldn't work with the open source drivers in Ubuntu 8.10, I decided to install ATI's proprietary driver. There was nothing listed in Ubuntu's Restricted Driver Manager for my card - so I downloaded the Catalyst Package directly from ATI's website.

After several failed attempts using ATI's automatic driver installer (which resulted in a black or garbled screen after rebooting), I eventually found a manual installation guide outlined at the Unofficial ATI Linux Driver Wiki that worked for me.

I've duplicated these steps below with adjustments made for my particular setup, in addition to extra commenting that would hopefully assist someone completely new to Linux (like myself).

This walk-through makes the assumptions outlined below. If any of this information is different for you - then update the steps to reflect your particular environment. I didn't include extra instructions for a 64-bit system, but the Wiki does.

• The filename of the ATI driver is:
  ati-driver-installer-9.2-x86.x86_64.run
• The ATI driver was downloaded to your desktop
• We are installing this on a 32-bit system

Step 1: BEFORE YOU BEGIN

This may not be a necessary step for you, but because I had messed around so much with the ATI drivers before finally getting them to work, I performed the following Terminal commands to reset my graphics driver back to the original, open source ones so I could be working with a clean slate.

Open Terminal and enter the following command to remove any previously installed restricted fglrx drivers:

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge xorg-driver-fglrx

Now enter the following command to reconfigure the X server. This will put your xorg.conf file back to how it was originally with the open source drivers. WARNING: this will overwrite any customizations you made to the xorg.conf file.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Ok, with that done - now we need to make sure a few necessary programs are installed before we begin manually installing the ATI proprietary drivers. Open your terminal and enter the following command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential cdbs fakeroot dh-make debhelper debconf libstdc++5 dkms

Step 2: DOWNLOAD ATI DRIVER

Go to ATI's Support and Driver page and use their search tool to get the Linux driver for your particular video card. This guide assumes it is being downloaded to your Desktop

Step 3: CREATE .DEB PACKAGE

Open terminal and enter the following commands to make your desktop the working directory and create the .deb package for Ubuntu Intrepid

Make the desktop your active working directory (replace 'username' with your username):

cd /home/username/Desktop

Now build the driver package for Ubuntu Intrepid:

sudo sh ./ati-driver-installer-9.2-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/intrepid

You'll now see a handful of additional files unpacked to your desktop. These are what we'll use to install the driver.

Step 4: INSTALL .DEB PACKAGE

sudo dpkg -i ./xorg-driver-fglrx_8.582-0ubuntu1_i386.deb ./fglrx-kernel-source_8.582-0ubuntu1_i386.deb ./fglrx-amdcccle_8.582-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

NOTE:
I think the instructions from the wiki assume the user understands how to properly reference files in Terminal, which - being brand new to Linux - I did not. Following their instructions exactly failed for me with 'file not found' errors. Instead I added the extra steps of first making my desktop the active working directory and then referencing the unpacked files with './' added before each filename in the command - which worked.

Step 5: UPDATE XORG.CONF FILE

Now we need to make sure the xorg.conf file has the fglrx driver setting added. In terminal, enter the following to open and edit your xorg.conf file:

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down to the 'Device' section and add the following line of code to that section:

Driver "fglrx"

So the section would look something like this ([...] being the other settings possibly listed in that section):

Section "Device"
[...]
Driver "fglrx"
[...]
EndSection

Save your changes:
On your keyboard, press Ctrl + X to exit nano and then press 'y' to confirm saving your changes. Press your enter key to return to the terminal prompt.

NOTE:
The wiki used gedit to open the xorg.conf file, which I apparently don't have on a fresh Ubuntu 8.10 install…so I used nano instead.

Step 6: INITIALIZE THE DRIVER

Use the following Terminal command to initialize the driver:

sudo aticonfig --initial -f

Step 7: (optional?) ENSURE DRIVER IS USING XORG.CONF

Ok - so I don't know if this step was absolutely necessary and the wiki seemed to indicate not all people would need to do this. Even so, I followed it just in case and it didn't seem to hurt anything.

To ensure the driver is using the changes made to the xorg.conf file, enter the following Terminal command:

sudo aticonfig --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf --tls=1

Step 8: REBOOT AND CONFIRM

Reboot your system. Afterward, open Terminal and enter the following command to confirm the driver is installed properly:

fglrxinfo

You should now see the following:

OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 4670
OpenGL version string: 2.1.8494 Release

That's it! The ATI driver is now installed. If, like me, you are doing this to enable s-video out on your card - follow the remaining steps if you aren't getting a signal yet on your s-video display or if it is in black and white.

Step 9: S-VIDEO DISPLAY

After installing the ATI drivers above and rebooting, the s-video display should be now working - or at least it was for me. If it isn't for you - then you'll have to do some additional troubleshooting. There is a lot of s-video specific settings for the xorg.conf file you can find from other users on the Ubuntu Forums.

My problem with s-video was that the display was in black and white. To fix this, I had to go into Catalyst Control Center and change the display type for the TV2 display to 'M/NTCS' instead of the 'United States' location option.

To launch Catalyst Control Center, open Terminal and enter the following command:

amdcccle