This post and the next few posts refer to upgrading a driver on an existing installation to the proprietary ATI driver.
For the procedure on a fresh ubuntu install, see the post titled "Fresh Install ATI Radeon (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS)" in this thread.
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1215&p=6089#p6327
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I was a happy Matrox User until I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS a few days ago. Instead of just recompiling, I got the error-messages that are already described in other posts (which I should have read beforehand
).After some google searching I decided to dump the Matrox P690 Card(s) and go for a cheap ATI Radeon.
Old setup:
- 2x P690 (1x PCIe x16, 1x PCIe x1) with DVI connectors.
- 3x DVI LCD Screens.
New Setup:
- 1x ATI HD 4350 with DVI and HDMI Port
- 1x HDMI to DVI 2meter cable.
- 2x DVI LCD Screens.
Basic Procedure, YMMV: (See other docs, but maybe this helps to ease the switch for you.)
- select card: Multiple Vendors, multiple Hardware/CPU versions, multiple interfaces (DVI, HDMI, Displayport etc.)
- I got a DVI/HDMI Combo card. That one required a HDMI to DVI converter cable (EUR 10,-) to be used with two DVI screens.
It is passively cooled, so no extra fan in the box. But it is two slots wide! Make sure it fits inside your box.
- Download the latest Matrox Drivers beforehand.
- Install RTFM (http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu ... tion_Guide) for proprietary driver.
- What is different:
- don´t manually mess around with the xorg.conf!
- on ATI, xorg.conf is built/created via the "aticonfig" program that will be installed together with the driver.
- "aticonfig -f --initial=dual-head --screen-layout=right --tls=1 --xinerama=on" is 90% of what you need for a dual-head setup.
-f: override xorg.conf (may need a rm -f xorg.conf before anyway.) --initial: create from scratch --initial=dual-head create for dual-head.
- "aticonfig -h" is the help screen for details, very long...
- ati has its own "registry" in /etc/ati/amdpcsdb This file contains additional settings that will be loaded by the driver but that are not in xorg.conf. Sometimes this amdpcsdb needs to be updated when X is not running to be effective.
- also there is a "default" copy in /etc/ati/amdpcsdb.default. I read somewhere (didn´t try), that sometimes you may want to delete the amdpcsdb, copy the .default to the basic version an re-apply the aticonfig settings again.
- I needed to set a different Video Output in Mplayer.
- they have a new 2d Accelerator, configuring it is described in the cchtml wiki-page. I did not manage to disable the old accelerator - will give it a try on my next ATI-driver reinstall. (Probably I played around too much with the setup when I didn´t have dual-head working.)
Issues/Problems:
- Initial setup w/o dual-head but with two screens that were cloned, the display and scrolling in Firefox etc was terribly slow and buggy. (Here I probably screwed up on the amdpcsdb settings). After I got the dual-head xorg.conf right, everything worked fine.
Compared to my first Matrox-setup this one was a piece of cake.
Reinstalling the ATI-Driver (Version update) seems to require a "full kill" of the existing files. (All documented in the wiki above.)
For multiple cards: What I found (but didn´t test): use "aticonfig -f --adapter=all --initial=dual-head" to get all adapters for the dual-head setting... YMMV.
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Bye Bye Matrox on Linux. Those two boards will probably end up on Ebay.
After two days of heavy usage and two more days of "normal" usage, there was no freeze-event (knock on wood...).