Nienhouse

ATI

(Edit: this tutorial does not work with Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and I will unfortunately not be able to update it for Karmic because I do not have the time nor hardware.)

(Edit 03/14/10: I no longer have the hardware to work on this issue. -This tutorial is no longer officially supported by myself- I personally suggest finding a way to get new hardware (NOT ATI – the driver aren’t worth it) and upgrading to the latest release of Ubuntu.)

Information on how to fix this issue in newer releases of Ubuntu is available.

Joseph Crowell
4/6/2010

Help with the open source ATI legacy drivers on Ubuntu 9.10:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

Follow that guide to the point where it links to “KMS with a Radeon card” then follow the link to here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/KernelModeSetting

and follow the instructions in the section KMS with a radeon card.

This worked perfectly for me on my ATI Radeon Xpress 200M.

With the newest realease of Ubuntu (9.04 Jaunty Jackalope) came a major problem with support for older ATI graphics cards. Though these cards work with generic drivers, the ability to use dual heads and more advanced configurations has been lost. You may think that you can simply head over to AMD’s ATI driver page and get a driver, but the latest version of Catalyst does not support the older cards. “Maybe I can just download an older version of the driver,” might be what you are thinking, but the old driver is not compatible with the new version of xserver that is included with Ubuntu Jaunty.

The only way to use the old driver is to downgrade your xserver, which is actually not too hard. As long as you have an internet connection and some terminal skills, you are set.

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