Installing new ATI drivers?

quackers

quackers

quackers

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Lo all,

I've got a cheap ATI card installed in this machine, it's an x300. Seems to work ok in windows but not in ubuntu 8.10. I can't get compiz to work and in turn the AVM manager won't run.

The ATI/AMD proprietary driver is installed in the hardware drivers manager, I've just downloaded the x300 32bit linux driver from the ati site, am i going to cause problems installing this?

Thanks all

Edit: Just noticed it's the ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver, the file is a .run file. How can i install this?
 
Well i just deactivated the existing driver and then reactivated it, apparently it downloaded a new driver. I've restarted and i'm getting the error:

"the Composite extension is not available" when trying to enable the desktop effects
 
It could be that the driver just plain won't work because ATi has yet to update their stuff to work with the latest Xorg that's in 8.10.

If you want to try be sure to remove the drivers already there by using the Hardware Drivers utility.

That file is just a plain old Linux executable. Open a terminal, cd to where you saved it, probably by saying
cd ~/Desktop
then execute it with
sudo ./blahblah.run
where blahblah is the name of the file. You can probably just type the first few characters of it and hit tab to let the shell finish typing it for you.
 
The default hardware driver installed by the ubuntu restricted thing should be fine for compiz.
1) Try typing 'metacity -c'. Do you get shadows on your windows?

Look in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
2) What does it say its using for a driver? 'ati', 'radeonhd' or 'fglrx'?

Once this stuff get's messed up it's not fun to sort it out :P
 
Thanks for the help chaps, i thought i'd try it in a virtual machine before i tried it on my dual boot machine :p

8.10 is installed in Vmware, all updates completed but no ATI drivers have installed :confused:

I've just downloaded the same drivers from before, i've created a folder in the home directory and put them in there.

So...

Cd test
then sudo ./ati.run

i'm getting command not found

Edit: metacity - c in a terminal, gets unknown option
 
A VM won't have hardware video acceleration; it's why you can't play all those nifty games in virtual machines. AFAIK the OS won't even know anything about the real video hardware, it'll just see VMWare's generic graphics that it can talk to and thereby give you an image on your screen.

So it's saying
bash: sudo: command not found

That would be incredibly weird.
 
Hmm so that my idea out of the window then, look like i'll have to go back to the proper machine and make a mess of that lol
 
gconftool-2 -s '/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager' --type bool true

Will work on all systems. Doesn't use hardware though. Just thought I'd test it out with metacity -c to see stuff was all installed correctly.
Seems -c didn't make it for 8.10 though. Will work in Ubuntu 9 and works in Solaris already.

Here's the long way to install Ati drivers: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Intrepid_Installation_Guide
 
Last edited:
quackers said:
Thanks for the help chaps, i thought i'd try it in a virtual machine before i tried it on my dual boot machine :p

8.10 is installed in Vmware, all updates completed but no ATI drivers have installed :confused:

I've just downloaded the same drivers from before, i've created a folder in the home directory and put them in there.

So...

Cd test
then sudo ./ati.run

i'm getting command not found

Edit: metacity - c in a terminal, gets unknown option
Click to expand...

Didnt think vmware could emulate ati cards yet :confused:

anyway you cant run the ati.run like that

you need the command "sudo sh ./ati.run" that should run the installer...
 
pingwing said:
you need the command "sudo sh ./ati.run" that should run the installer...
Click to expand...
Is the sh really necessary? I wouldn't have thought so, since on most systems the default shell is bash and /bin/sh is linked to /bin/bash. It seems a bit counterintuitive to my feeble mind:
Hey, bash. Execute the file ati.run using sh, which also happens to be you, bash.
 
Iirc sh is essentially the original Unix subset of what Bash has cloned and expanded upon. sh should give more cross platform compatibility. It also lets you use tab autocomplete on a folder full of scripts without specifying ./<name> all the time.
 
Ah interesting! I could only ever make the installer run in Gentoo with the sh command. (portage couldnt install new enough drivers for the 4870 last time i tryed)
 
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