Help before I throw in the Ubuntu towel

Lysander

Lysander

Lysander

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I've more or less had it with this now. I've been trying for days to get an older ATI driver [8.3] installed with no luck. No-one has been able to tell me how to do it, the restricted manager can't see the driver and using the help sections on the Ubuntu forums website always cedes problems. There must be a simple way of doing this.

Can anyone tell me how to install an older ATI driver? The latest would be no problem since I'd just use EnvyNG. But an older one? No-one seems to know.
 
Because I use HDMI on this monitor and the newer ATI drivers have HDMI scaling problems with anything past 8.3 at the moment.
 
Ugh that's it, I've totally given up. Heaven forbid you try to get a working driver for a new graphics card.

I tried a workaround by installing the 8.6 and then trying to fix the problem within the driver. Didn't even get that far. The system rebooted, I then enabled the driver through the restricted driver panel, rebooted again and the screen was fixed at 800x600 - with no higher options. Fine, so I disabled it and reinstalled the 8.6 drivers... on reboot I just got a white screen, nothing else.

My experience with these drivers has been terrible. It's far better to use Windows, at least then the drivers have been written properly.
 
Ahhh see
i use HDMI on my rig (nvidia) and it has problems too but its quite easy to get working.
Doesnt the restricted driver use an older version?
Cant you select an older version using envy? Think you could used to.
 
Lysander said:
Ugh that's it, I've totally given up. Heaven forbid you try to get a working driver for a new graphics card.

I tried a workaround by installing the 8.6 and then trying to fix the problem within the driver. Didn't even get that far. The system rebooted, I then enabled the driver through the restricted driver panel, rebooted again and the screen was fixed at 800x600 - with no higher options. Fine, so I disabled it and reinstalled the 8.6 drivers... on reboot I just got a white screen, nothing else.

My experience with these drivers has been terrible. It's far better to use Windows, at least then the drivers have been written properly.
Click to expand...

Its not linux or Ubuntu at fault here, its your GFX card manufacturer. cant you change to DVI?
 
brummie said:
Its not linux or Ubuntu at fault here, its your GFX card manufacturer. cant you change to DVI?
Click to expand...

I know it's not the fault of Ubuntu, my point was that at least with Windows you have drivers that are easier to install and work better. That may be crap on the part of ATI, but the point still stands no matter how little I may like it.

I could go to using DVI yes, but now with nothing but a white screen to greet me in Ubuntu and no way of knowing how to change that apart from reinstalling, I may just delete the partition.
 
I had similar problems. :(

I couldn't get any ATI drivers working at all for my HD4850. Method 2 on the site JSW worked fine, but whenever I would restart my computer Ubuntu would just crash after the loading screen with the bar. I could tell it was a video driver fault because my HD4850 would just suddenly stop making noise at that point.

Shame because I really preferred Ubuntu to Windows. Hopefully ATI will start supporting Linux better one day.
 
Be sure to drop ATi/AMD customer support a polite but frank email letting them know that their customer support leaves much to be desired. Nobody's going to fix this junk if they don't know it's broken. Volunteer to give them debugging information if they need it and are willing to walk you through the acquisition process.

Bring on the discrete Intel graphics boards! At least they give a crap about us.

EDIT: Heck, nothing's easier than already having the drivers in the kernel so that you, the end user, don't have to lift a finger to have everything working. Intel put a lot of effort into having semi-respectable free drivers where the other two do not. ATi improved in my eyes when releasing some R*** specs but there's still a long way to go.
 
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Try installing EnvyNG, select ATI but chose the cutom option and that shoud let you install the older drivers, it works the same on the nVidia side

Kimbie
 
Lysander said:
I could go to using DVI yes, but now with nothing but a white screen to greet me in Ubuntu and no way of knowing how to change that apart from reinstalling, I may just delete the partition.
Click to expand...

Known ATI graphics driver bug. It's to do with the graphics driver and compiz. When you get to the white screen, press alt+f2, then type in (blind) "metacity --replace" and you'll find the desktop will load.

ATI's graphics driver support for Linux absolutely, completely and utterly sucks, and they show no interest in really making amends on that front. Knowing I want to use Linux on my PC, I buy Nvidia because at least I get working drivers and a company that is interested in putting the development time into it.
 
Calm down :) ATI do actually support linux better than nvidia as they released technical specifications for their cards. Some decent OPEN SOURCE drivers are in the works. they will come with a future version of Ubuntu.

Dont give up, nvidia are the devil in the linux world, their binary blobs work reasonably well but they refuse to provide hardware documents or help the open source programmers at all.

ATI cards will be just as well supported as the Intel graphics on many laptops and todays netbooks.

Edit: and progress is slow with ati's blobs but that does not matter with a new open source drivers in the works.
 
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ATI's approach to the open source stuff is admirable and yet poor at the same time. Other companies that have pushed into open source drivers have opened up their existing drivers, ATI has basically just open sourced the technical details of the hardware, so the community is having to do the work ATI engineers have already done, figuring out how to get the Linux driver to talk nicely to the ATI hardware. The open source drivers still don't have full, stable, 3D support for the R520 chipset, nor do they even perform all that well (approx. half the speed of the closed source drivers under most benchmarks) R600 support is still a good distance off, that's with architecture well over a year old, let alone RV770. Compare this to their approach to Windows, where support is out before release, or NVIDIA's approach where Linux support is usually there within a very short time frame of hardware release.

For what it's worth, I'm not an NVIDIA zealot, ATI do have the fastest cards out there with this current generation, and at least ATI are actually doing open source work; however NVIDIA are the only ones consistently releasing fully featured, easy to install and up-to-date drivers.
I don't really care whether the driver is open source or not to be honest, I just want it to work.
 
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