Ubuntu ATI driver
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011
A couple of weekends ago I was at OggCamp and the first talk on the Sunday was a good one by LornaJane Mitchell. For one it was a timely reminder of how my IT career started. It was also a virtual kick up the backside to get a bit more use out of my blog. I tend to think in completed articles, but I do have a precedent for short technical comment entries, so here goes more…
I’ve just upgraded my desktop machine, it isn’t exactly state of the art, the new one is only a 3.2GHz P4 and is my first 64 bit desktop, but that’s beside the point. The point is I dropped the old SATA HD into a new box and let Ubuntu get on with the job of sorting out the hardware changes (as an aside Windows 7 put on a bit of a show and then gave up in a huff!).
All went well apart from the graphics, which meant I couldn’t even get the login prompt (I knew I should have stuck with a console and typing startx!! To cut to the chase the solution that worked for me was to boot into the recovery mode kernel and do a one off boot into a safe graphics mode. From here I used the Additional Drivers tool to remove the proprietary ATI driver. This allowed me to reboot into the standard desktop and confirm thins were working, but sadly I couldn’t get above 1024×768 which restricted screen space somewhat.
As it happens I doubt the above was needed because my next action was to boot once more into recovery mode and restore the proprietary driver and reboot. This time when the screen went blank and complained about being ‘out of timing’ I used ALT-F2 to bring up a CLI login and from there used:
sudo aticonfig --initial
This created /etc/X11/xorg.conf, although unfortunately this didn’t make any difference, but it did prepare the ground for:
sudo aticonfig --resolution=0,1280x1024,1024x768
which persuaded the driver to use a more sensible set of parameters that worked with the monitor.
The most notable difference I’ve spotted in the logs so far is that when not working I had the line:
(II) fglrx(0): Setting screen physical size to 423 x 317
whereas when working it is:
(II) fglrx(0): Setting screen physical size to 338 x 270
I’ve not explored whether there is anything else, or what that actually means!
The only two items of note were:
So off we went down the explanation of what a browser was and that he was already quite comfortable using both Opera and Firefox, as was his younger brother (who is 3). In fact they are both rather too good at some of the games on the 