How to install Radeon Open Source Driver?

Question

I have an MSI Radeon HD 7850 card. MSI provide no Linux support, and the AMD driver gives me an Unsupported Hardware watermark that does not show up in screenshots.

I uninstalled the proprietary driver and found that Unity 3D no longer works, and I really only picked Ubuntu because of the excellent shortcuts provided in the recent versions.

Trying to locate the open source driver has been a pain for me. According to the documentation I have read it is pre-included in Ubuntu 12.04, yet there is no Unity 3D support. I tried using the newest drivers from AMD's website, but that also had the watermark.

Does anyone know how I can get the open source driver? If not, does anyone know how to remove the watermark. I'm on the verge of going back to Windows.

Solution 1

Removing the watermark is very simple with a bit of cut and paste, then a command:

How to remove the “AMD Testing use only” watermark?

If you did want to use the open source drivers (which are not as feature complete) you just need to remove the fglrx driver:

sudo apt-get remove fglrx*

then ensure the open source one is installed. It should then be picked up:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati

The problem with the HD 7000 series is that support for it in the open source driver only arrived around Christmas, so unless you are running the xorg-edgers PPA you would be better off with just removing the watermark for now.

Solution 2

to remove the driver not supporting your grafics card: read the part and follow "Problem: Need to purge -fglrx" of this site: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/VideoDriverDetection

ensure with synaptic if "radeon" driver (open source) is installed the open source driver radeon should work then properly i hope :D