Introducing ATi Graphics Cards and Kubuntu

Posted by Al Twohill on 24 January 2008 | 1 Comments

Tags: desktop, hardware, ubuntu, linux

I've had bad experiences with ATi cards and Linux before. Happily it was not the case this time. Here's how I set up my Sapphire ATi Radeon 3870 HD. I also throw in the desktop effects install at the end.

To change, or not to change

First up, you don't actually have to do this at all! The default open source driver works fine for most situations. That said, if you're like me and like bling and games you will really really want to use the 3D accelerator on that card of yours.

Now that we've decided we want to go to the dark side of proprietary drivers, the first step is to download them. 

http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/linux-radeon.html 

Put it somewhere the installer can create temporary files (your home directory is a good place). Now open up Konqueror and make it executable (change the file name to match your one).

sudo +x ati-driver-installer-7-11-x86.x86_64.run

And then execute it!

sudo ./ati-driver-installer-7-11-x86.x86_64.run

After it verifies the file contents a window will pop up and guide you through the installation. You can pretty much just click 'Next' through the entire installation.

Once thats done, we need to do our initial config. This will overwrite the display, screen and monitor sections of our xorg.conf file (not as bad as nVidia though - it rewrites everything, including my keyboard settings!!) so you may wish to back up the file first.

sudo aticonfig --initial -f

And we're done! Restart your X server by logging out then pressing Alt-E, or just press CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE, then log back in again. You'll see in the K menu the ATI Catalyst Control Center, and you can now play with your desktop effects, 3D screensavers, and games. Enjoy! 

Enable compiz

We have to whitelist our driver, as it's not confirmed to work in all cases. This translates to possible crashes. I'll update this after a while to say how stable it is. Open up the compiz file in kate

kdesu kate /usr/bin/compiz

Edit the line below the one that says 'WHITELIST=...' add fglrx to it. Mine looks like this

WHITELIST="fglrx nvidia intel ati radeon i810"

Then save the file. 

In Ubuntu, now all you need to do is select Desktop Effects and you're done. Kubuntu however is holding out for KDE4 which brings its own bling. This means in Kubuntu you need to do it a little more manually.

sudo apt-get install compiz compiz-kde compizconfig-settings-manager librsvg2-common

Now press ALT-F2 and type

compiz --replace

The settings config is in K->Settings->Advanced Desktop Effect Settings. The screenshots below are a little more impressive.