Oneiric 64-bit and AMD/ATI proprietary drivers

[Jose Ildefonso Camargo Tolosa]

Hi!

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 6:24 AM, O. Sinclair <o.sinclair at gmail.com> wrote:
> Am about to officially give up.
>
> I have an HP Pavillion dm4 laptop with the dreaded hybrid graphics, in my
> case in Intel integrated and an ATI HD5450 "discreet" card.
>
> On 11.04 I used 32-bit PAE and there it worked. But as I have 4Gb RAM
> decided to opt for 64-bit when installing 11.10.
>
> Most things work well, there are some fairly odd apps that are only 32-bit
> but I have no major problems (except new KDEPIM but that is separate issue).
>
> However - installing AMD/ATI Catalyst drivers fail one way or the other. If
> I do from "additional drivers" I just get a message it fails. If I do from
> Muon dito. If I use cli command apt-get or aptitude it can go all the way to
> configuration.
>
> And that is where I get stuck whether I use downloaded from AMD package,
> build packages, run the installer or whatever I do. Have been thru countless
> sites with instructions and forums.
>
> The last step here is normally "aticonfig --initial -f" with or without -f.
>
> I either get an error "PowerXpress error: Cannot stat
> '/usr/lib64/fglrx/switchlibGL': No such file or directory" or "no supported
> adapter present".
>
> So finally my question here: has anyone managed to get the hybrid graphics
> with ATI/AMD working in 11.10 64-bit or are there ohters who have spent (too
> much) time installing and failing?
>

Yes, I have installed them.  I just installed these packages (using
aptitude, should work with apt-get):

fglrx-updates
fglrx-updates-dev

If you tried to install fglrx package from ATI (ie, manual install),
you will have uninstall it first, and then cleanup the mess it leaves
behind, basically, some broken symlinks... I had a problem with that,
after I removed "manually installed" drivers, I was unable to install
the official packages.

Oh, don't forget to install (if not already installed):
linux-headers-generic (or whatever linux-headers you need for your
current kernel), remember, this *have to* be the headers for your
running kernel, and about any linux-headers will satisfy fglrx-updates
dependency, but you need the one corresponding to your kernel, or it
will fail.

I don't know on your system, but on mine, aptitude shows "duplicated"
packages names, it looks like the "duplicated" is the 32 bits version,
but I have had odd issues (like conflicts with *a lot* of packages
when I try to install most of these), make sure to pick the correct
one.

Now, I have had bad experiences with so called "hybrid graphics", in
my case a ION-based netbook... in the end, I had to disable "discrete"
graphics and leave only Intel enabled (because otherwise the netbook
would get too hot, and drain battery real fast).

I hope this helps,

Ildefonso Camargo