If the above doesn't help, and you are patient enough, I'd wait. I've today heard a rumour which I think is likely to happen sooner than later. The ATI Catalyst drivers for linux are suppost to go open source soon.
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Browse All TopicsI have an IBM ThinkPad Z61m which has an ATI mobility x1400 running Ubuntu Dapper. The generic driver that came with Ubuntu didn't fully support my screen, so I got the proprietary linux driver from the ATI website and installed it. Everything worked fine. Yesterday, I went to their site and downloaded and installed the newest driver. Now it seems that anything requiring OpenGL stutters or doesn't work at all. XGL/Compiz will boot, but nothing will work and windows don't have title bars. SuperTux (a 2D side-scroller) stutters and trips, but when I uncheck OpenGL in the options, it works fine. I'm sort of a no0b at this, so I really have no idea what to do. Thanks.
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That the windows are undecorated means that Compiz likely has died. That GL doesn't work likely means that there are severe problems with the lib(s) (perhaps some xorg update _apart_ from what you've done with the proprietary driver has had an adverse effect here). It sounds like you are "falling back" to software GL (check your glxinfo output). I don't think we'll need any logs to look at to determine that further;).
How to deal with this (apart from heeding ATIs advice (on the download page, no less;-) to "not fix it if it ain't broken":-) can be a chore.
I'd advice you to try follow ATIs uninstall instructions, and then try to reinstall the latest driver.
If this still borks out, we'll need start worrying about looking at logs etc.
Rindi, I suspect that rumour has its root in the plans from ATI to try amend their licensing so that more distributions can incorporate their driver "natively" (so one could just apt-get it ... for Debian and clones). If that would entail actually opensourcing them though... I'm rather doubtful. Would be very glad to be wrong though:-).
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by: bryanlloydharrisPosted on 2006-08-15 at 18:32:31ID: 17322753
Maybe the xorg.conf is different for this new version. You could try this:
conf
mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf,old
cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf-vesa /etc/X11/xorg.conf
ati-config --initial --read-from=/etc/X11/xorg.