I upgraded my Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, and it not only broke the ATI proprietary fglrx driver, but also the ability to use the VESA or open-source ati or radeon drivers.
I have an ATI RV610 which is an ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT.
I have Linux Kernel 2.6.27-14-generic and 2.6.28-13-generic.
With fglrx, vesa, ati and radeon, the Xserver hangs the machine as soon as it starts by invoking X or startx, which is seen by observing that caps lock doesn't work. There's nothing useful in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, no errors at all. This is with either kernel.
When I download a new proprietary driver from ATI, I install it successfully on kernel 2.6.27, and it doesn't hang when X starts up, but it just shows a blank screen and does nothing. I also can't CTRL+ALT+Backspace out of X at this point.
In all the years I've used ATI's Linux drivers, this has happened almost every time I've upgraded my kernel, but it's been fixable with much effort. This time I'm really stuck.
Does anyone know how to fix these problems?
Best Answer
The built-in support for ATI cards in ubuntu 9.04 is better. You shouldn't need the fglrx.
I would suggest doing some kind of test clean-install, though perhaps the Live CD would be sufficient to verify that ubuntu default ATI drivers will work for your system.
The reason I suggest clean install is that customizations for Video (e.g., directly using fglrx rather than using "hardware drivers" menu) and customizations for network (e.g., using ndiswrapper) mess with the upgrade process.
After banging my head against strange video problems (and network problems) after an upgrade, I solved my problems with a back-up of my data, including .mozilla directory, a list of installed packages, a clean install, and a manual restoration of my desired environment.