A Fix For AMD Catalyst On Ubuntu 15.10 Is Coming

While Ubuntu 15.10 launched last week, the AMD Catalyst driver hasn't been working but that's in the process of changing.

While there's been patches for letting AMD Catalyst work on Ubuntu up through the Linux 4.2 kernel, the binary driver has ended up failing to work on Ubuntu's 4.2 kernel as found in Ubuntu 15.10. So even right now with a sudo apt-get install fglrx on Ubuntu 15.10, the driver will not work.

As reported in the earlier article, users have found the workaround to be just downgrading to the Linux 4.1 kernel where the patched Catalyst 15.9 driver then plays happy. However, this new workaround that's in the process of landing in the Wily archive, fixes the issue by building the fglrx driver's shim against GCC 4.9 rather than GCC 5.

Alberto Milone pushed a fixed driver into wily-proposed. "Add a dependency on gcc-4.9, and force fglrx to use gcc-4.9. This prevents fglrx from dying on initialisation. Credit for finding out the actual problem and for suggesting a workaround goes to David Burrows. Note: this is only a workaround, and it will be dropped as soon as a proper fix from upstream is available."

This lengthy bug report details the struggle people have faced in getting AMD's proprietary driver working on this newest Ubuntu Linux release. If you want to get your Ubuntu 15.10 box running with AMD's blob prior to the new update landing in the official Ubuntu package archive, you can follow the steps for using the driver from wily-proposed via this bug comment.