Linux Mint Forums

Hello everybody.
I've recently decided to switch my laptop, which is usually used to watch YouTube videos and browse the internet, to Linux mint 14. The main reason I made the jump is that Steam for Linux works in Linux mint, and many interesting games have Linux versions. Mint by default works fine, however, games like team fortress 2 and playonlinux do not run smoothly at all. playonlinux games run very slowly, and TF2 wont start without amd's FGLRX driver. so I installed it, and updated it through software sources. Doing so, however, has resulted in TF2 still not working at all, and playonlinux games have weird, numerous issues. Minecraft also crashes on launch, with either openjdk or java 7. When running ubuntu 12.04, none of these issues exist. however, I dont like the unity interface, and much prefer mint as an OS. Does anyone know how to get FGLRX to work properly?

My laptop is running an amd a6-3400m, with a amd hd 6650m GPU. however, mint does not see the 6650m, only the 6520g chip in the APU itself, if this helps.

EDIT: further information: I was using linux mint 14 64 bit with the MATE desktop, and ubuntu 12.04 64 bit.

So it seems it would be better for you to install LM13 (Ubuntu 12.04 inside) rather than LM14 (Ubuntu 12.10).

eanfrid wrote:So it seems it would be better for you to install LM13 (Ubuntu 12.04 inside) rather than LM14 (Ubuntu 12.10).

Good idea. I'll try it tonight. is there anything linux mint 14 has that 13 doesn't? (that is actually important, anyway)

LM14 has somewhat newer packages versions and a newer kernel. Most of them are already backported to LM13, so the differences are indeed quite thin and cosmetic. However LM13 is LTS i.e. supported until 2017/04.

Alright, I tried installing LM13, and was given an error message that stated that my installation media was corrupted. I figured that I would re-download the iso and burn it to a dvd instead (the first time was via usb), but this gave me the same issue. running linux mint 14 installer gives me no issues, so it seems that the linux mint 13 kernel doesn't like my machine for whatever reason....
I've never had any issues running linux mint on intel chipsets (hd 2000, 3000, 4000) on either the desktop or mobile. it seems that my next laptop will have to be one of them instead of AMD.

quick update, i used a usb stick with a known working mint 13 installation on it, and got the same issue, unspecified i/o issue. i am going to try LMdebian and see if that will boot.

update. Finally got mint 13 running. it appears that my laptop does not like booting from usb, as the same iso for lm13 works fine when written to dvd. updating now, hopefully AMD's drivers will actually work.

Nope. finally got to playing around with AMD's drivers, and, well, it is even worse than LM14. now, in addition to no games working, the desktop UI flickers and lags behind the mouse pointer...