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Installing the latest ATI driver in Kubuntu Feisty test 5 and up.
Warning, this can hose your OS! Best if you have a little experience with xorg; although, I walk you through a bad xorg. Older Ati cards may not be supported, I only use a Radeon 9800 as my oldest card so earlier cards may not be supported.
Updated: I have found in the latest Kubuntu beta release that the OSS ATI drivers work much better than the proprietary ATI drivers, just make sure you setup your monitor if you are having issues with the OSS ATI drivers. You may also need to tweak the xorg.conf file by adding your preferred display resolution. After installing the proprietary ATI drivers and playing with Wine and Cedega they could not use 3D acceleration even though glxgears and fgl-glxgears appear to run flawless. Everything works in the OSS drivers so unless you want some specific setting from ATI I would avoid their drivers and stick with the OSS drivers installed with Feisty Beta +. Make sure multiverse and universe repos are on. Install restricted-manager in Adept
Open a terminal and type: $ sudo restricted-manager
Select ATI video driver. If you get an error make a backup of your xorg.conf file found in /etc/X11 and issue (this will default xorg so make a backup and add any tweaks back once the driver is working): $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg Now try to enable the driver again. Now the fun part! Issue the following: $ sudo aticonfig --initial $ sudo aticonfig --overlay-type=Xv Open the /etc/X11/xorg.conf again and add this to the very end of the file if missing: Section "Extensions" Option "Composite" "Disable" EndSection Still in the xorg.conf: If the screen sizes are wrong, mine were set to 1024x768, add the correct size to the beginning of each line in Screen, you will see lines with many screen sizes add to each line the highest resolution (1600x1200 for example) your monitor can handle or the size you prefer. Mine needed to be 1440x900 as the highest setting. Important! Now add your monitor. Open the terminal again and type:
kdesu systemsettings
Click into Monitor and Hardware Select your monitor if available, otherwise select generic and set your refresh rates. Check that the video driver doesn't say Vesa, if it does select fglrx. Save and restart X. You can reboot or do a Ctrl+Alt+Backspace
Now the reason I switched is because I got crappy frame rates and a glx error with the driver Feisty installed in the test releases. The default did work fine in 2-d and 3-d so I wouldn't suggest switching unless you are having problems in games or like to play with shit. This worked great for me on an ATI 9600 mobility and an x1300pro. I also got the latest ATI drivers working on Edgy, which is more involved. For a x1300pro at work I followed this. Feisty was much nicer ;) You might also want to look at Envy , which installs Ati and Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu, but be warned that this is a non-standard way to install drivers and uninstalling will be more painful in some cases.
Shot of GLXGears and restricted-manager:
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