Hi,
I have installed Ubuntu 10.04 on my old Intel MacBook Pro. The OS is fine, but I think there are problems with the default ATI driver. I have been reading alot on-line about propriety ATI drivers etc. Could you please help me with this? Which drivers I need to install in order to increase my OpenGL performance and make Houdini more stable. I have all kind of Display issues like my mouse icon is acting strange and I get a horrible crash upon running flipbook. It is an ATI Radeon X1600 I am talking about. And I am really confused, since some driver packages support this adapter and some not?

Thanks.

Yes, you'll need to install ATI's proprietary driver, as it is not installed by default due to licensing issues.

Go to System->Administration->Hardware Drivers, and search for new drivers. The ATI proprietary driver should appear, enable it, and then restart X. Houdini should run much better after that.

Wow! Really?! So there is hope at the end!
… I did not see any drivers being listed in that section. I hope it works… somehow.

Thanks for the help.

If it doesn't find it automatically, you can use the legacy ATI driver (cat 9.3) found here:

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Legacy/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.12&lang=English [support.amd.com]

…but it's a bit more of a hassle to set up than using the automatic method.

It says:
….
The following products have been moved to the legacy software support structure:
…
…
ATI Radeon X1600 Series
…

So this is my card there, does that mean this driver is no longer valid for me?

Thanks.

Ah! This is horribly confusing. There are docs suggesting that ATI X1600 is no longer supported inside the Catalyst package… for Ubuntu 10.04… So should I install an older Catalyst package… but then it says in many places that The old Catalyst will not work under Ubuntu 10.04.

What should I do?

“All future ATI Catalyst™ releases made available past the ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 release will not include support for the legacy products listed above or any of the features associated with those legacy products.”

Does that mean that X1600 is still supported for Catalyst 9.3?

“The Linux ATI Catalyst™ driver will only be supported in Linux distributions prior to February 2009 for the legacy products listed above.”

Does that mean that it is not supporting Ubuntu 10.04?

In a nutshell, Catalyst 9.3 is the latest driver version you can get for the ATI X1600 card. If this driver won't install on Ubuntu 10.04, then you're out of luck – you'll need to get a new graphics card. Sorry

I see, which means… buying a new laptop… because that X1600 is stuck in that crap MacBook Pro…

Or maybe install an older distro… Will H11 run on something that supports Catalyst 9.3… and in that case… what is this thing?

I mean, What is the latest distro that will work with Catalyst 9.3?

Thanks.

I think it is:
8.04 LTS (hardy)

Is H11 going to work on Ubuntu 8.04?

Thanks.

I believe H11 will work on 8.04, you'd just need to download the appropriate gcc version for that distribution (gcc4.1, I believe).

Did you try installing the ATI 9.3 driver bundle in Ubuntu 10.04? I'd give that a shot first before installing a new OS.

Edit: Nevermind trying to install 9.3 on 10.04. It won't work (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_lts_graphics&num=1 [phoronix.com]). Looks like Ubuntu 8.04 is your sole option.

Thanks man! This was really helpful. I am going to try the catalyst 9.3 / ubuntu 8.04 combination. Although i did not understand the part about the gcc version, well i know what it is, but i thought it was gcc 4 even under ubuntu 7.04 ? Anyway, i will give it a go. Thanks for the help, once again.

I also have the same problem (since spring 2009) when ATI decided to become the worst vendor ever. But it's just on my secondary laptop, although I would like to have it fixed with newer kernel and distro.

Unfortunately there are no possibilities except maybe one (which I might try if I get time) : to install new distro, and then to downgrade kernel to 2.6.27 - which is the latest kernel supported by catalyst for our late legacy cards. However, there's 50-50% that it will work (I succeeded that with Suse 11, but didn't have wlan on it).

On the other hand, if you install Ubuntu 8.04, or like me 8.10 - you will have your Houdini running, but the system might have serious faults - I am not able to install anything with dependencies (anything apart from manual installations) because the 8.10 repositories are dead for a long time. Fortunately 8.04 is LTS, so I hope you'll have luck if they maintained all repos. I didn't bother because, again, my wlan doesn't work on 8.04 (there's always something missing on the low-end hardware, it's just a matter of what you're ready to sacrifice).

Anyway, for the record, please inform here about the outcome of 8.04, if you install it.