August 09, 2011

ATI Radeon in Linux

Back again.... As promised, I will tell my wonderful adventures with my Celeron 2.7 Ghz.  Originally I was running Linux Mint 11.  I liked it because tethering my phone was super easy and the layout was pretty similar to that of Windows.  The only issues that I seemed to run into were video drivers.  There were no drivers for my integrated video.  I ran to a small computer store on 23rd street and picked up an ATI Radeon of some sort.  It had VGA, S-video, and DVI outputs (which is what i was looking for).  When I plugged it into my computer, I could not boot up.  I tried a fresh install of Mint 11 and that didn't work either.   I kept getting a slot conflict error of some sort, no matter what slot I put it in.  After a few tries, I switched to Mint 10.  I successfully installed and loaded Mint 10, but for the life of me could not find a control panel, and I could not find a clue in the forums.  After spending quite a bit of time searching, I decided to revert back to Ubuntu.  I downloaded the latest version, and successfully installed it after moving my video card to a couple of different slots.
     Finally, my video card was working and my TV was connected as well.  The 3D and Open GL was horrific, though.  I read up and figured out that I needed to set up the "Catalyst" driver.  I spent quite a bit of time looking through AMD/ATI's driver support and downloading the driver.  The instructions weren't that clear and a bit hard to follow...actually, I never figured them out.  After a while, I came to the conclusion that Ubuntu probably already had these drivers some where.  I looked in the software downloading section and found the catalyst driver there. After installing it, I still had issues with Open GL and 3D.  It wasn't until  after I uninstalled all of the other ATI drivers that I was able to get everything to work right.

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