Ubuntu – How to switch between fglrx and ati drivers

10.10atidriversfglrx

How can I switch between fglrx and ati (open source) drivers without uninstalling fglrx?
The thing is I'm using FGLRX on a daily basis, because it's better for movies–OS driver displays annoying horizontal line while playing movies. FGLRX also does this, but it's less visible. That's only disadvantage of OS driver.

When I want to plug in external monitor with different resolution than my laptop's LCD I have to use open source driver, because FGLRX can't display two different resolutions at the same time.

I can uninstall FGLRX, but it's rather inconvenient to do this all the time. I've noticed that when I'm using FGLRX there is xorg.conf file and when I uninstall it, then the file is missing.

So my question is how to switch between them? It'll be perfect if I could do this without restarting my computer either.

I'm using Ubuntu 10.10, laptop/netbook MSI U250.

Best Answer

In theory it's possible: first, you should modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I think you need to modify things in the "Device" section (well, Xorg nowdays works fine without xorg.conf, as you noted too, so the other solution is rename xorg.conf so X won't use it).

But it's only the half part of the story, the other part is the kernel driver. I would "blacklist" fglrx as a kernel module, so it won't be load, when you don't need it: /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

I don't have a setup for ATI card in this way, but I have similar for nvidia, to switch between nvidia's binary driver and nouveau (open source driver for nvidia cards).

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Ubuntu – Can’t install ATI proprietary drivers in 12.10

I started with a clean 12.10 install (not an upgrade) My card is a Radeon HD 5450

First thing I done was to install Linux-source and Linux headers

sudo apt-get install linux-source
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic

I noticed that many with Nvidia cards were having to do this and am sure I saw mentioned some-where that it also helped ATI users.

Like everyone else if I installed either of the proprietary drivers after reboot I was able to login but lost unity.

One thing I did notice is that installing the driver did not install Catalyst control centre (not sure if it is the same for everyone else)

So I installed Synaptic package manager and installed fglrx-updates from there

enter image description here

Now the Catalyst control centre was installed.

Upon rebooting however instead of being able to login with no Unity the system was hanging at the splash screen.

So I applied nomodeset and this time it booted with Unity present

Here is the result of fglrxinfo

enter image description here

And here is what software sources says

enter image description here

With nomodeset applied I might not be getting the splash screen on boot up but fglrx-updates is working well. I would go as far as to say that it is performing better than it was in 12.04

More info

Grub offers me 2 kernels

3.5.0-18-generic and 3.5.0-17-generic

The later one '18' is good, the older one '17' still loads without Unity

Ubuntu – Radeon HD 2000, 3000, 4000 on Ubuntu 12.04.2 and higher: fglrx (legacy) unsupported, what to do

There's the ppa:makson96/fglrx PPA that has the legacy driver. It will also downgrade your Kernel and X server to older versions, as the legacy driver is not compatible with newer Kernels nor X servers. However, please read the release notes from the link as the driver isn't fully compatible with the Unity used in Ubuntu 13.04.

If you want to use the PPA, run these commands from the terminal to downgrade the Kernel and X server and to install the legacy driver:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:makson96/fglrx
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install fglrx-legacy

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Can’t install ATI proprietary drivers in 12.10

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