[TriLUG] Feisty was a b*tch of an upgrade

[Sean Myers]

Just a thought...did you upgrade with the free drivers installed, or 
fglrx? Also, what card are you running?

As for the warning, that's definitely true. Installing the ATI drivers 
is a convoluted enough process when compared to the nvidia without the 
added joy of drivers that aren't really compatible with your kernel.

Does any have any stories of a simple ATI card install involving an X 
server? If so, was 3d acceleration also involved?

--
Sean Myers
System Administrator
American Research Institute
(919) 228-4961


Andrew C. Oliver wrote:
> Yeah I did get it working.  I don't know what went wrong that I couldn't 
> get them installed w/o clean install.  I didn't do anything different.  
> I suspect something stuck a bad SO somewhere.  I was aware of everything 
> you mention below.  I just wanted to warn people "Feisty is not the same 
> upgrade as Edgy if you have ATI"...  I had previously/continue using the 
> proprietary drivers.  In part because the Feisty installer no longer 
> seems to recognize my card and does not put a compatible w/free drivers 
> device string in the Xorg.conf.
> BTW anyone get the ATI Catalyst control center to meaningfully work?  I 
> can change resolutions but nothing else seems to have a meaningful 
> effect (esp the dual monitor part).
> 
> -Andy
> 
> Sean Myers wrote:
>> I can't speak for the free drivers, but ATI's fglrx drivers don't 
>> officially have support the 2.6.20 kernel until 8.36:
>>
>> http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/linux_8.36.5.html#184277
>>
>> The driver version in feisty's repos is 8.34:
>>
>> http://packages.ubuntu.com/feisty/misc/xorg-driver-fglrx
>>
>> Here's a wiki page that'll get you set up with the latest fglrx 
>> drivers (yay, we get to build kernel modules!):
>>
>> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI
>>
>> I'm using an X1950GT now, so the ATI drivers are my only option at 
>> this time. While I'm spamming links, here's wiki page of the free 
>> Radeon driver:
>>
>> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver
>>
>> -- 
>> Sean Myers
>> System Administrator
>> American Research Institute
>> (919) 228-4961
>>
>>
>> Andrew C. Oliver wrote:
>>> I started out on 6.06, upgraded to Edgy and now to Feisty.  Edgy was 
>>> a pretty painless upgrade with only the swap issue being kinda 
>>> irritating and requiring effort/thought/google.
>>> Feisty disabled X windows for starters...  For some reason I couldn't 
>>> get either the free or proprietary ATI drivers to install after this 
>>> (this may be partly me as for some reason I occasionally block on 
>>> something even if I've done it 100 times)...   I ended up having to 
>>> copy my stuff off to another drive and do a re-install from scratch, 
>>> then the video STILL didn't work until I manually installed the 
>>> proprietary drivers and used an old X configuration (I'd tried that 
>>> before the clean install too).
>>>
>>> All in all FUN to do right before a conference.  I never did get my 
>>> or any other projector working again!  So I did LinuxFest on OS 
>>> X....Ian would be proud.
>>>
>>> -Andy
>