Compiz has broken after installing 12.10 with ATI Catalyst 12.10 drivers

Question

After upgrading to Quantal yesterday I installed the new ATI Catalyst drivers, the 12.10 version, for my ATI Radeon HD 7850 card. Upon logging into Ubuntu I am presented with no Unity. I can access terminal with Ctrl + Alt + T.

I tried uninstalling the driver, but that did not fix Compiz.

Does anyone know how I can fix Compiz? Any info on getting drivers working would be good too.

Edit: I solved this problem by first uninstalling the proprietary driver through the terminal, which I believe is in /usr/share/ati/amd-uninstall.sh. Then I rebooted and installed the open source driver, radeon, and rebooted again. It's slower than the proprietary drivers but it works.

Solution 1

Hi I have the answere for all of you, the problem is 12.10 doesn't include the kernel headers for some reason. so when installing drivers run sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) you can do this before or after it doesn't mater. Once thats done reboot your system and enjoy!

Solution 2

Uninstall ATI driver

$ sudo sh /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh   (if file is existing)
$ sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx fglrx_* fglrx-amdcccle* fglrx-dev*

Install free driver

$ sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 xserver-xorg-core
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Reboot

$ sudo reboot

Download ATI driver

$ mkdir ~/catalyst12.6/
$ cd ~/catalyst12.6/

To know what Graphic Card you have, do lspci -v | grep -A 12 VGA. Download the appropriate driver for your machine here from the AMD/ATI Website. File should be something like amd-driver-installer-12.6-legacy-x86.x86_64.run (not version 12.04 like in previous answer, 6 months earlier). Move it in ~/catalyst12.6/ . Unzip it if needed.

$ unzip amd-driver-installer-12.6-legacy-x86.x86_64.zip

Install ATI driver

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential cdbs dh-make dkms execstack dh-modaliases fakeroot libqtgui4

$ sudo chmod +x amd-driver-installer-12.6-legacy-x86.x86_64.run
$ sudo sh ./amd-driver-installer-12.6-legacy-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/precise
$ sudo dpkg -i fglrx*.deb
$ sudo amdconfig --initial -f
Reboot and Check if installation is successful
$ sudo reboot
$ sudo fglrxinfo
   display: :0  screen: 0
   OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
   OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 4200 Series 

OpenGL version string: 3.3.11653 Compatibility Profile Context It is all good, as you can see, after last reboot, fglrxinfo displays my ATI Graphic card correctly.

Solution 3

Well I ended up giving up and transferring as much info as I could to a usb drive (via the terminal obviously) and completely reinstalling the operating system (with 12.10). For whatever reason it now works on a fresh build, and with all the same hardware and software that was on before. I don't know why the in-place upgrade from 12.04 to 12.10 causes failure but a clean install of 12.10 doesn't but I hope this helps someone out at least a little. Unfortunately I get to spend today rebuilding my web server from scratch.

Good luck!

Comments

[OregonTrail]

fglrx is the proprietary driver

[Clintonio]

That was a typo. I later fixed it with the accepted solution. Thanks for pointing out my error.

[Clintonio]

Canonical should not have suggested that we upgrade when it clearly doesn't work. I was happy on 12.04. I think I'll reinstall 12.04 and stick with it till 14.04 at this rate.

[Clintonio]

I solved the problem, I edited in the solution to the first post.

[OregonTrail]

Thank you! This solved my problem (broken Compiz with fglrx). After a reboot, I had to add nomodeset to my linux boot line on grub or else I would be stuck at the logo (purple) screen.