Oneiric 64-bit and AMD/ATI proprietary drivers

[O. Sinclair]

Am about to officially give up.

I have an HP Pavillion dm4 laptop with the dreaded hybrid graphics, in 
my case in Intel integrated and an ATI HD5450 "discreet" card.

On 11.04 I used 32-bit PAE and there it worked. But as I have 4Gb RAM 
decided to opt for 64-bit when installing 11.10.

Most things work well, there are some fairly odd apps that are only 
32-bit but I have no major problems (except new KDEPIM but that is 
separate issue).

However - installing AMD/ATI Catalyst drivers fail one way or the other. 
If I do from "additional drivers" I just get a message it fails. If I do 
from Muon dito. If I use cli command apt-get or aptitude it can go all 
the way to configuration.

And that is where I get stuck whether I use downloaded from AMD package, 
build packages, run the installer or whatever I do. Have been thru 
countless sites with instructions and forums.

The last step here is normally "aticonfig --initial -f" with or without -f.

I either get an error "PowerXpress error: Cannot stat 
'/usr/lib64/fglrx/switchlibGL': No such file or directory" or "no 
supported adapter present".

So finally my question here: has anyone managed to get the hybrid 
graphics with ATI/AMD working in 11.10 64-bit or are there ohters who 
have spent (too much) time installing and failing?

Either way I would like to know whether to pursue this or just give up 
and run open-source Radeon.

Kind regards,
Sinclair