I will digress a bit from the theme of the blog, but seeing a lot of people having issues with installing the ATI drivers on Ubuntu, I decided to put my thoughts and experience with it here.

I have experimented with the drivers quite a bit. I own Sapphire Radeon HD 4650, and always try out games on Wine(i wish all of them worked in Gnu/Linux) which is the reason I need updated drivers on my rig. Two weeks ago, AMD(then ATI) updated the drivers to 10.8 version. By their claims, these drivers introduce some performance gain, bugfixes and general stability. I installed the driver 30 minutes before writing this post and it actually works pretty good.

Now for the technical part:

What you need is a rig with AMD graphic card powered by a Linux Mint or Ubuntu Lucid distro with installed build-essential. Driver (which in fact is shell script) can be downloaded Here. The script is called ati-driver-installer-[version]-[CPU architecture].run. Download it to new empty folder - lets call it ati in home folder.

Now we have the driver and we can start with installation. Before we actually commence the installation, we have to purge/remove the old ati driver from the system. You should try these commands to remove it:

sudo apt-get purge fglrx

or

sudo sh /usr/share/fglrx/fglrx-uninstall.sh

After the removing is done, reboot the PC. You could be asked to turn the graphics to low details (safe mode). Do that. Next, open a terminal and navigate to the folder with the driver.

cd ~/ati/

Add permissions for execution to the script:

chmod +x ati-driver-installer-[version]-[CPU architecture].run

Generate distro-specific packages(for lucid or mint 9):

sudo ./ati-driver-installer-[version]-[CPU architecture].run –buildpkg Ubuntu/lucid

or list all available distro builds:

sudo ./ati-driver-installer-[version]-[CPU architecture].run –listpkg

After this operation (if everything went ok) you will have several .deb packages. Install them with the next command:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

The drivers are installed. If this is your first ATI driver installation, invoke next command to make the initial config:

sudo aticonfig –initial

Reboot the PC, and you’ll have the drivers installed. If you have any problems, refer to the Installation Instructions on the driver’s download page.

Disclaimer: This post is a general guideline for installing the proprietary ati drivers for linux practiced by the author. The author will not accept any liability for any damages/data-loss caused using the technique described above.