fglrx issue

[Colin Law]

On 10 February 2014 16:05, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10 February 2014 11:52, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have 12.04 running on a machine with a graphics card identified by lspci as
>> VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
>> RS780D [Radeon HD 3300]
>> An upgrade to fglrx caused a drop back to unity 2D due to a bug [1].
>
> That is a very loosely-worded, poorly-described bug.

Not my bug, I am just tacked onto it.

>
> If you go to ATI's driver download site, what's the latest Catalyst
> driver for your GPU?
>
> I can't do this for you - you don't specify whether it's a desktop or
> notebook, card or integrated, 32-bit or 64-bit Ubuntu, anything much,
> so I can't go through the selection screens for you.
>
> When you find what version of the driver is current, what versions of
> Ubuntu support that driver?
>
>> I installed trusty daily in another partition in order to see whether
>> the problem also exists there, but on trusty I find that fglrx is not
>> installed at all yet everything appears to work correctly.  Nothing is
>> shown in Additional Drivers.
>
> Again, not enough information. We are not psychic, we can't guess.
> What driver /is/ X.org using on your pre-release test system?
>
>> Can anyone suggest what may be going on?
>
> Not for sure without much more info, no.
>
> At an unsubstantiated guess:
>
> * The version of Catalyst for your card isn't supported any more in
> the 12.10/13.04/13.10 version of X.org and so on, which the 12.04-1
> /et seq/ releases use. So you have fallen back to unaccelerated 2D
> graphics.
>
> * On the prerelease install, it's using the FOSS driver, called
> "radeon", because no supported version of the Catalyst drivers is
> available.

Excellent, thanks Liam, that is the information I was looking for, I
did not know about the FOSS driver.   I did not provide additional
information as I was not looking for a fix, just enough information to
understand the situation in order to investigate further.  I
understood the issue with 12.04 dropping back to 2D, that was
discussed in the earlier thread.  I see that I was not sufficiently
clear about the information I was looking for in my post :(

12.04 was working fine till just recently with fglrx by the way, so it
is a regression that it suddenly failed following an fglrx update.  I
have got round the problem there by holding it at an earlier release
as I have noted in the bug.  Many have fallen foul of it, the guy with
the issue in another thread here with the windows game not running was
the same issue.

Thanks also for letting me know that I can find which version should
be ok by looking for recommended catalyst version.  For 12.04 and 3xxx
graphics the recommended version is 13.1.  It was the upgrade to that
version that caused the problem so it certainly appears to be a bug in
fglrx.  It is obviously highly undesirable that an update should break
an LTS version.

On trusty, however, both the X version and the kernel are higher than
those supported on the AMD website, so you are correct in that fglrx
possibly just does not work in trusty.  Also you were right that the
radeon driver has been installed.

Thanks again, all is now clear.

Colin