Issue 1 with Precise

[O. Sinclair]

On 16/05/12 20:24, Leslie Anne Chatterton wrote:
> Hi O. Sinclair,
>
> I have a somewhat similar laptop: Gateway AMD Turion 64 and ATI Radeon
> Xpress 200M 5955 PCIe graphics. No dual vidoe. I initially found it
> would not install 12.04 at all due to what I can only describe as an
> error in the install routines. Installation stopped and froze when it
> could not find a driver for the built in Broadcom wireless card, even
> when the wired internet was connected. The solution was to use the
> alternate installer and make some changes to the grub scripts when
> first time booting, made permanent after the first successful boot.
>
> To return to your question: my laptop is using the generic VGA drivers
> and has a speed of less than 60 FPS. Not very impressive. The
> "Additional Drivers" utility finds nothing. I tried using the ATI
> proprietary drivers but they didn't work. Apparently some ATI cards
> are just not supported by the manufacturer, admittedly they are old,
> but still worked well in 11.10. The problem may lie with the X.org.com
> people, but I guess you can't expect 6 year old hardware to go on
> forever. The ATI fgrlx drivers just won't work for such systems as
> yours and mine.
>
> On 16 May 2012 08:37, O. Sinclair<o.sinclair at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I have an HP laptop with so-called switchable graphics. One part is Intel
>> "lean" card and one is ATI Mobile HD 5450.
>>
>> I am now on Precise 12.04 AMD64
>>
>> There is supposedly 2 ways to shift between the Intel and the ATI cards:
>> either via something called vgaswitcheroo or by installing the proprietary
>> AMD drivers "fglrx", either from Ubuntu repos or from AMD drivers site.
>>
>> The "switcheroo" solution works so-so, I can switch off the powerconsuming
>> ATI card and rely on my Intel card. Have never really managed to switch the
>> other way however.
>>
>> With AMD drivers it worked in 11.04 this worked and in 11.10 with
>> pae-kernel. You switch drivers and reboot (possibly restart x would be
>> enough) and it is OK until you switch back.
>>
>> Since I tried with 64-bit version this has stopped working. The AMD driver
>> seem to install but once you try to config x.org you run into various
>> issues. The most persistent saying:
>> PowerXpress: '/usr/lib64/fglrx' must not be writable by group or others
>>
>> I have googled (well startpage actually) and read forums and bugreports but
>> nothing works.
>>
>> Anyone using a similar combo on Precise AMD64 and got the ATI fgrlx drivers
>> working?
>>
>> Am seriously considering revering to pae-kernel (have "only" 4Gb RAM so
>> should not really make a huge difference).
>>
thanks for your reply but my system is less than 2 years old on the 
market and AMD site claims it should be supported (the card that is).

where this "goes bonkers" for me is something in the 64-bit install of 
fglrx - I am not the only one, have found several reports on the issue 
on the net. But no solution that works.

Maybe I should just bite the bullet and try the 32-bit pae kernel again 
as that was the last time I got the AMD drivers to work proper. Though I 
hate not being able to use the full capacity of the system.