[solved]Display confusion... Total confusion

[thegrumpyone]

G'day all

I am left perplexed as the display characteristics of my p\c when Linux flavours are installed namely Ubuntu oneiric and Mint Lisa. I have found that my monitor (32" Mars-Tec corporation) that if I may speak in such Volga terms, works perfectly with Microdollors Broken Windows Vista and 7. I have an Intel core i5 quad core 2.8 cpu with an ATI Radeon 4300\4500 series graphics card with 4 gig ram set on 1280x800 resolution. The problem that I am encountering is that sometimes when I boot up my p\c my screen usage is reduced all around the outside edges of the screen. This applies until I either reboot or shut down for the day and also Linux does not use all of my screen anyway so before this glitch I don't get full usage of my 32" screen. Unless I use a Linux evaluation disc which I find quite strange.

[terdon]

Umm, have you tried changing the resolution?

[thegrumpyone]

G'day,

Among lots of other thing yes

[terdon]

Just checking!

In that case, what is your graphics card? NVIDIA/ATI? If one of these, are you using the closed source driver? Have you tried using the manufacturer's tool to change the resolution? Should be either nvidia-settings or aticonfig.

[thegrumpyone]

G'day Terdon,

I have tried but according to system tool\additional drivers the window that opens tells me that "NO PROPRIETARY DRIVERS ARE IN USE ON THIS SYSTEM". When I activate "ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver" Tested by the LinuxMint developers. I get a rainbow of coloured strips in my top toolbar with an abundance of font and spelling errors all though my system. so then I try to activate "ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver (post release updates) I then get a message telling me that there is an error and then it proceeds to remove "ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver" it then goes back to "NO PROPRIETARY DRIVERS ARE IN USE ON THIS SYSTEM". I guess that now you can see why my confusion is indeed total as my graphics card is an ATI RADEON 4300/4500 SERIES

P/S maybe we should stop referring to things that open our screens as window (sounds like micro$oft) perhaps we should be calling them PANES.

Regards thegrumpyone

[terdon]

Heh, ok ati is known to be problematic with linux. You could try downloading the river directly from their website. It may be a newer version.

One more thing, what window manager (or pane manager, if you prefer ) do you use? Are you in gnome3? If so, I had all sorts of display problems with it myself. So, try one of the other desktops (gnome fallback, clementine, mate, xfce, kde or whatever) and see how that goes with the ati drivers. Apart from that I don't really know what you can do...

[thegrumpyone]

G'day again,

Yes and do I chance and which do you recomend

[terdon]

Well, depends. Assuming you have the latest mint you should already have cinnamon installed. However, your best chance would be with xfce. It is the simplest if the easily available window managers.
So, install xfce4 using synaptic, then log out, log back in choosing xfce as your session type. The reinstall the ati drivers and see if they work. That way at least you will know where the problem lies.

[thegrumpyone]

G'day again..

There are lots of packages in synaptic package manager which one should use, or should i just go 64 bit i think that the intel i5 780 is 64 bit

[terdon]

I'd be very surprised if it isn't. In any case, if you try to install a package with the wrong architecture you will get a warning.

Assuming you are talking about xfce, just install the mint-meta-xfce package, It is a "metapackage" that should automatically install all the necessary components of mint's xfce4 desktop.

[thegrumpyone]

Sorry to be such a pain..

I manage to install xfce4 but have the same problem and Intell 780 is not 64 bit thank you for your assistance hope I havent annoyed you to much

Regards Shane

[terdon]

No worries, you have not annoyed me at all! OK, so since it isn't 64 bit, I assume you have installed the 32bit xfce and then reinstalled the ATI drivers and logged into an xfce session.

If it still doesn't work I don't know what the problem is. However, there are MANY threads about ATI-specific problems out there you may well be able to find your answer in the forums. Otherwise, I would recommend starting a new thread containing the word ATI in the title. Last time I had an ATI card I found a lot of knowledgeable people in the forums.

Sorry, I couldn't help and good luck!

[thegrumpyone]

Thank you to terdon for making me think,

I have fixed my problem all I had to do is as follows

Old AMD Driver Removal: This is supposing that you had an old driver,

Before installing any new driver, you need first to uninstall the old AMD driver. Via the terminal, run the following commands to remove it:

sudo sh /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh


sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx fglrx_* fglrx-amdcccle* fglrx-dev* xorg-driver-fglrx

Note: If you receive errors when executing the first command, then skip it and move on to the second command.

ATI AMD Catalyst 12.2 Driver Installation

Start now the installation of ATI AMD Catalyst 12.2 Proprietary Display Driver with this sequence of commands (driver supports both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures):

cd ~/; mkdir catalyst12.2; cd catalyst12.2/


wget -O amd-driver-installer-12-2-x86.x86_64.run http://goo.gl/zewU2


chmod +x amd-driver-installer-12-2-x86.x86_64.run


sh ./amd-driver-installer-12-2-x86.x86_64.run

The setup wizard will then guide you to the installation of the driver:



After completing the setup wizard, make an update for the X.org file with this command:

sudo aticonfig --initial -f

Finally, reboot your system to complete the driver installation:

sudo reboot

That's it!

Regards thegrumpyone

[thegrumpyone]

P\s in the setup wizard I choose suse linux 12.1 as operating system. When in fact i've got linux mint lisa 32 bit but I believe method will work for 64 bit....

[terdon]

That's great! Glad you could fix it