xserver does not start on LMDE 15 MATE with Radeon HD 7850

[isix]

Basically I get the exact same problem as this person :

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=103142

But this was a while ago around version 13. I've done the nomodeset xforcevesa thing. No dice. What is really strange is that I already have regular Linux Mint 15 installed which works perfectly. What amuses me even more is that I had the same setup with an old geforce gt 220 and everything worked fine with quadruple boot grub (like I always do, it might have become a three boot machine as I am now experienced enough with Debian to just use LMDE). I can give my whole specs if that mean anything.

AMD Athlon II X4 645
Corsair Vengeance 8,00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 800MHz
ASUSTeK Computer INC. M4A78LT-M-LE (AM3)
2048MB ATI AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series (Sapphire/PCPartner) (7850)

It also has an onboard video card but all operating systems do not even see it when I have my 7850 connected to a monitor. I don't know if I can disable it in the BIOS, but considering everything works fine in regular Linux Mint...I'm perplexed as to what is wrong here.

TIA.

[isix]

Experience has taught me that the xorg and proprietary drivers from AMD do not play nice together. I always end up with two panels, then three after a reboot, then four...

After much head-banging into the brick wall of my windowless cell in the asylum, I always purge the xorg drivers first:

Code: Select all

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon
$ sudo reboot
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install fglrx-amdcccle-updates
$ sudo aticonfig --initial
$ sudo reboot

Problem solved. I've never had any trouble after installing the AMD proprietary drivers using that method.

^^slight variation to this worked (just used fglrx-driver instead...no such thing as amdcccle-updates apparently)

But there is a major confused moment going on here. When I installed LMDE 15, I installed it over a previous Debian 7 x64 partition, telling to format over it obviously. The problem was for a seemingly non-obvious but obvious reasons. My old video card driver was there (nvidia) and not only that, ALL software installed on that partition remained and was brought with LMDE 15.... Wat

99% of the applications work too. Now I'm only concerned by a little thing, the list of updates update manager reports is huge, should I review each of them to see if it is wise to do so ? I removed some x drivers that I do not have from the update list but that is it. I can't believe the nvidia cleanup program was actually needed...along with all this stuff remaining...I'm sure that wasn't an option during installation ( I installed it a while ago and when I saw it failing I didn't touch it for a month or so). Bizarre!