Howto: Radeon HD 5770 Drivers

[mDuo13]

So I don't know if anyone else is as crazy as I am, trying to run Linux Mint 7 Gloria on a brand-new ATI Radeon HD 5770 card, but in case they are, I thought I should explain how to get it working since it was so much trouble.

Basically, the story is this: the current (as of this post) ATI fglrx closed-source drivers - Catalyst 9.10 - do not support the 5770. But there is a newer (beta) version of the drivers available for free to developers in the form of the ATI Stream SDK. Just go to this page and download the file ati-opencl-beta-driver-v2.0-beta4-lnx.zip (82.3MB). It'll ask you for a free registration; as far as I can tell, this is harmless.

The install procedure once you have that is relatively painless - just follow the on-screen instructions for installing and reboot when you're done. Though I can't make promises that this won't screw up your X config and leave you trying to revert it in the terminal... so be careful, I guess.

There's one caveat, which is that the beta drivers drop an ugly "AMD Testing Use Only" watermark on the bottom-right corner of your display. Luckily, the folks over at the Phoronix Forums have figured out a workaround.

Apparently in the time since I did this, the complete 9.11 version of Catalyst has been leaked, so that may be an even easier, better solution, but I haven't tried it so I can't say for sure whether it works...

[Husse]

And don't forget this