Installing Catalyst on Ubuntu 11.04

[jtholb]

@devius

Thank you so much. I had been struggling to get the catalyst drivers for natty installed both via Jockey (actually they downloaded and installed but were basically worthless) and manual download and install (a lot of errors) and had no luck, but the X-Swat ppa did the job. It took me a few hours (at least) to stumble on your post to get it working, but it is and I am so grateful.

As for upgrading the catalyst drivers to 11.6, did you uninstall the fglrx packages via Jockey or the terminal or some other way and then manually install the newest version off of ATI's website? (I ask because after the hassel of arriving here and getting the display settings working I might commit hari kari if I unnecessarily broke it again)

[jtholb]

Ok, so I managed to upgrade the drivers (I followed http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubu...ivers_manually). In order to have watchable video (HD videos were really painful) I opened CCSM > General > OpenGL > and unchecked "Sync To VBlank"

It's not perfect, but at least the jerkiness doesn't drive me insane. I haven't tried any 3D games yet, but I'll get there. Hopefully it's at least usable. Thanks again.

[devius]

Nice that my suffering was helpful to someone
About the jerkiness, it will drive you insane after a few days, so when that time comes your best bet is switching to unity-2d. So much better performance! It's a bit different than regular Unity and the few effects it has are very crappy, but the performance is all worth it. Trust me, scrolling in the web browser doesn't have to be so painful
3D performance on other apps is as expected. Only the desktop experience takes a dive with Catalyst and Unity :P

[chronniff]

Trust me, scrolling in the web browser doesn't have to be so painful

Haha, I have switched to the open source drivers for the time being because of that, as well as some other problems with catalyst and unity

[sandy8925]

Hi,
I use ubuntu 11.04 64-bit.
If I use Ubuntu's restricted drivers option to install Catalyst drivers (11.4), then I am unable to install the 11.8 drivers later.
used the procedures from http://wiki.cchtml.com for Ubuntu

To make it clear:
1. use Ubuntu's restricted drivers option to install Catalyst drivers (11.4)
2. use the same program to remove the drivers then reboot
3. download 11.8 driver, generate packages for Ubuntu/natty and "sudo dpkg -i *.deb"
4. no aticonfig or amdconfig present (is it necessary to run this after installation anymore?)

didn't try rebooting to see if it worked (since I had already reinstalled and didn't want system to break again).

However, if I try installing the 11.8 driver directly after installing a fresh copy of Ubuntu, works flawlessly. I guess the restricted drivers procedure screws up some stuff?

[twriter]

If you don't mind reinstalling from scratch, this automated installer may help:

http://xvbat.sourceforge.net/d-i/

In general, I recommend installing packages built with

./*.run --buildpkg ...

If you're not willing to reinstall and you have trouble building packages yourself, distributed with the above installer are repository archives for Lucid, Maverick, and Natty. The Natty archive includes Catalyst 11-4 through 11-8.

Tim

[DanL]

I guess the restricted drivers procedure screws up some stuff?

It probably leaves behind configuration information in /etc/ati/ . You should purge the packages according to the 'Removing Catalyst..' section in the ATI wiki.

[schnelle]

Trust me, scrolling in the web browser doesn't have to be so painful

Scrolling in chromium is perfectly smooth here with fglrx (tear free on) and kwin desktop effects.
On other hand, in firefox, it is very choppy. But I don't use firefox so I don't care

[jcgeny]

fedora has a wonderfull support for nv/ati drivers using kmod package .
it is always up-2-date few days after new driver or kernel is out , there is nothing to do to have it well doing .