fglrx issue

[Liam Proven]

On 11 February 2014 13:49, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just one further thing I don't understand.  Why is the fglrx driver
> not shown in Additional Drivers on 12.04 when it appears to be the
> recommended driver for my card?  No drivers are shown ther


I'm glad I was able to help, BTW. I am no expert on this, I have
merely learned a little from trying to fix my own problems.

My GPU is unsupported except by what is now called (one of) the legacy
Catalyst driver(s?). The driver that supports it only works with a
now-obsolete version of X.org - I think X.org v1.1. It's now on 1.3 or
later.

Precise (12.04) originally came with X.org 1.1.
Quantal came with X.org 1.11 or something like that.
Raring came with 1.12.
Saucy with 1.13.

(I may not have the exact version numbers correct.)

When updates to Precise were released, they backported the Quantal,
then Raring, then Saucy kernel and X.org to 12.04 - these releases
with the newer components are called 12.04-1, 12.04-2, 12.04-3 etc.

So, for example, about 5 days ago, 12.04-4 came out:

<<
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS
(Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products,
as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.

As with 12.04.3, 12.04.4 contains an updated kernel and X stack for new
installations on x86 architectures.
>>

Note well that line about "updated X stack". That means a new X.org.

My ATI GPU is not supported in any version of X.org after the one in
12.04. It is *not supported* in the version of X in 12.04-1 or later.

So if you update to 12.04-2 or something, your fglrx driver stops working.

If you do a fresh install, you will not be offered the Catalyst
driver, as it won't work with the newer X.org versions.

There is a PPA with an older version of X.org so that you can still
use the Catalyst Legacy drivers on newer OSes, but I could not get it
to work:

https://launchpad.net/~makson96/+archive/fglrx



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