New Approach To ATI Linux Driver Installation

While this guide is focused for Ubuntu users, at Phorogit are the latest packaging scripts for all of the included distributions (Arch, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Red Flag, Slackware, and SuSE). Phorogit can be browsed using its git viewer, while to quickly access this repository you will need to have git/git-clone installed. On most distributions (Ubuntu included), git can be installed from the distribution's package repository. With git installed, the below commands will download the fglrx 8.01 x86/x86_64 Linux driver, fetch the latest packaging packaging code, extract the contents of the ATI installer, and replace the 8.01 packaging scripts.

$ wget https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-8-01-x86.x86_64.run
$ git-clone http://www.phorogit.com/repo/fglrx-packaging.git
$ ./ati-driver-installer-8-01-x86.x86_64.run --extract atibuntu-dir
$ cp -vr fglrx-packaging/Ubuntu/ atibuntu-dir/packages/

Once the Catalyst 8.02 driver is out, the above commands will not be needed (aside from fetching the driver itself) unless a future update requires you accessing Phorogit for a new feature or fix. The next step is to then generate the Ubuntu packages using the --installpkg or --buildpkg arguments. Below is the syntax.

$ cd atibuntu-dir/
$ ./ati-installer.sh 8.45.4 --buildpkg Ubuntu --autopkg
OR
$ ./ati-installer.sh 8.45.4 --buildpkg Ubuntu --installpkg

As of January 24, there is a bug with the Ubuntu packaging scripts that results in the install package process to not actually install the ATI packages. Mario is aware of this and a fix can be expected soon. In the meantime though, the --autopkg process had worked without fault in our testing on a clean Ubuntu 7.10 system. All of the build dependencies were automatically installed and it had functioned as expected. Clicking the resulting deb files had installed fine, until the installPackages() issue is addressed. One item that the Ubuntu packaging scripts or Ubuntu packages don't address is the automatic configuration of the xorg.conf file. You will still need to modify the file manually or just run sudo aticonfig --initial followed by restarting the X server.

Extending the capabilities of the ATI driver installer to handling the dependency checking is a terrific innovation. This makes the ATI binary driver installation extremely easy even for novice Linux users. Hopefully in the coming months these --installpkg and --autopkg routines will be adopted by the other supported distributions. Installing binary drivers in Linux can be an issue for many users, as you can see from a number of threads in the Phoronix Forums, but this latest work is one-step forward towards a Linux driver nirvana.