laan97ac Posted November 18, 2009 Share Posted November 18, 2009 Hi all,Loooong time no see, great that my favorite forum is still alive and kickin' I disappeared to userland for a while. I guess that is what happens when you come across a distro that just works and works and works (Mint 7).Now I could not resist upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 and I really like it. Smooth install, and it even caught my Broadcom wireless and installed the driver - this used to be such a nightmare and one of my reasons for jumping to Mint...Now another issue has come up. I am on ATI mobility radeon x600. Laptop is about 4 years old and it is indeed a dated card I think. Under other distros and earlier installs, the system would automatically identify the proprietary ATI driver and propose to install it. But that does not happen here. Even if I go to Administration - Hardware drivers, only the Broadcom proprietary driver is shown to be in use. System does not seem to recognize the ATI card at all.Graphics are working fine as far as I can see though.But during boot I get a quick little message that screen resolution is changed from something like 1152 x 1024 to 1024 x 768 (not exactly sure of the numbers) and then the system boots normally. This message was not there when booting Mint 7 and earlier Ubuntu based installs.1) How do I check what graphics driver is being used?2) How do I make the system recognize my ATI x600 card and find the driver?3) Is this maybe a general 9.10 issue, so I should just wait some months instead of messing with it now? Thanx for all your ideas in advance Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted November 18, 2009 Share Posted November 18, 2009 Sadly, your legacy ATI card is no longer supported by Ubuntu's latest version of Xorg and ATI's proprietary driver. Any attempts to install this driver will just cause you grief. Search through the forums for Frank Golden's extensive analysis of this situation.You have to use the open source Radeon driver for these legacy cards. It's OK in most situations. Ubuntu doesn't offer you the option to install the proprietary driver.I just switched my desktop to an nVidia card. This may not be an option for your laptop though. You could try changing the display resolution to what you want - if its offered by the Radeon driver. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
laan97ac Posted November 18, 2009 Author Share Posted November 18, 2009 Ok sad, so I can stick to earlier Ubuntus or at least keep away from trying to install the proprietary driverafter some seconds of thinking:Looks like latest Mandrive Gnome works well with support for the driver? Any experiences?It has been ages since i touched Mandy 2006... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frank Golden Posted November 18, 2009 Share Posted November 18, 2009 (edited) Hi all,Loooong time no see, great that my favorite forum is still alive and kickin' I disappeared to userland for a while. I guess that is what happens when you come across a distro that just works and works and works (Mint 7).Now I could not resist upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 and I really like it. Smooth install, and it even caught my Broadcom wireless and installed the driver - this used to be such a nightmare and one of my reasons for jumping to Mint...Now another issue has come up. I am on ATI mobility radeon x600. Laptop is about 4 years old and it is indeed a dated card I think. Under other distros and earlier installs, the system would automatically identify the proprietary ATI driver and propose to install it. But that does not happen here. Even if I go to Administration - Hardware drivers, only the Broadcom proprietary driver is shown to be in use. System does not seem to recognize the ATI card at all.Graphics are working fine as far as I can see though.But during boot I get a quick little message that screen resolution is changed from something like 1152 x 1024 to 1024 x 768 (not exactly sure of the numbers) and then the system boots normally. This message was not there when booting Mint 7 and earlier Ubuntu based installs.1) How do I check what graphics driver is being used?2) How do I make the system recognize my ATI x600 card and find the driver?3) Is this maybe a general 9.10 issue, so I should just wait some months instead of messing with it now? Thanx for all your ideas in advanceHere's the scoop.Starting with Ubuntu 9.04 a new Xserver was used. This new Xserver doesn't work with ATi's proprietary drivers from Catalyst for Linux 9.3 and earlier. Starting with Catalyst for Linux 9.4 ATi dropped support for a whole slew of so called legacy cards including your x600.By dropping support I mean Ubuntu won't even recognize the card.The latest Catalyst for Linux releases (starting with 9.4) work fine with the new Xserver but only for the newer HD cards.The proprietary drivers are available in the repos but DO NOT try to install them.They will install ok but severely break your X.Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 include open source Radeon drivers (installed by default) that work ok but don't provide hardware 3-D acceleration.This will affect how some games behave.Mint 7 is based on Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid) and uses the old Xserver so you can use the proprietary Catalyst for linux drivers up to release 9.3.If you are using a desktop upgrading your video card to a supported card or better yet ditching ATi completely in favor of Nvidiais an option.Nvidias proprietary 3-D drivers still work with later versions of Ubuntu.BTW, I first tried Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty) back in April and ran headlong into the ATi created mess. At that time the Radeon open source drivers were ok but would crash Open GL based programs like GoogleEarthLinux and Stellarium.A later Radeon update fixed the problem but there is still no 3-D hardware acceleration.The folks working on the open source drivers are making progress and hopefully will be able too provide hardware 3-D in the future that works as well as the proprietary drivers. Edited November 18, 2009 by Frank Golden Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frank Golden Posted November 18, 2009 Share Posted November 18, 2009 Ok sad, so I can stick to earlier Ubuntus or at least keep away from trying to install the proprietary driverafter some seconds of thinking:Looks like latest Mandrive Gnome works well with support for the driver? Any experiences?It has been ages since i touched Mandy 2006...PCLinuxOS 2010 gnome edition installs with the proprietary ATi drivers and will work with your card.PCLinuxOS is based on Mandy.I have both the gnome and KDE versions installed on my machine as well as Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS 64 bit and Ubuntu 8.10 64 bit.Everything works great. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted November 18, 2009 Share Posted November 18, 2009 Ok sad, so I can stick to earlier Ubuntus or at least keep away from trying to install the proprietary driverafter some seconds of thinking:Looks like latest Mandrive Gnome works well with support for the driver? Any experiences?It has been ages since i touched Mandy 2006...I use Mandriva Gnome 2010 but the two computers it's installed on don't have ATI graphics. One has an Intel IGP and the other has an nVidia card. I assume Mandriva is still using the older version of Xorg if the ATI graphics work OK with the fglrx driver. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
laan97ac Posted November 18, 2009 Author Share Posted November 18, 2009 Thanx to all for great input.I guess I can use this as an excuse to buy a new laptop...Since this is Ubuntu 9.10 I guess the new Mint 8 will have the same problem as well as the other ubuntu based distros - I guess it is really Xorg that is the problem here and not ubuntu as far as I can understand? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted November 18, 2009 Share Posted November 18, 2009 Thanx to all for great input.I guess I can use this as an excuse to buy a new laptop...Since this is Ubuntu 9.10 I guess the new Mint 8 will have the same problem as well as the other ubuntu based distros - I guess it is really Xorg that is the problem here and not ubuntu as far as I can understand?As far as I can figure it, any distro that uses the latest version of Xorg will have the non-support issue for ATI legacy cards. However the Radeon driver is OK if you don't need hardware based 3D acceleration. You can get some basic desktop effects with the Radeon driver. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frank Golden Posted November 19, 2009 Share Posted November 19, 2009 Thanx to all for great input.Since this is Ubuntu 9.10 I guess the new Mint 8 will have the same problem as well as the other ubuntu based distros - I guess it is really Xorg that is the problem here and not ubuntu as far as I can understand?I just reread your initial post and Mint 7 is based on Ubuntu 9.04 not Ubuntu 8.10 as I previously mentioned.Mint 6 is Intrepid based.Apparently Mint 7 has the latest open source drivers so you don't have video issues with it.Mint 8 is based on the latest Ubuntu (9.10).It is partly an Ubuntu issue, the devs didn't have to use the new xserver. At the time they first implemented it it was beta softwareand it may still be.This isn't the first time they have used beta software, when Ubuntu 8.10 was released they included Firefox 3.0 beta as the default browser. At that time many addons didn't work with FF. I questioned one of the developers about this and the reply was that they were "future proofing" Ubuntu 8.10 and that the final release of FF 3.0 wasn't available at the time of Ubuntu 8.10 release.It became available a few weeks later and the repos updated it.Most of the blame rest squarely on AMD/ATi.I will never buy an AMD/ATi product again.If you get a new notebook I suggest you look for one with an Nvidia card. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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