Questions about Ubuntu

[Thomas Charron]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 12:38 PM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Thomas Charron <twaffle at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Bruce Labitt <bruce.labitt at verizon.net> wrote:
>>> Does Ubuntu support ATI/AMD video cards out of the box?  3D drivers
>>> included?
>>  Yes, you simply have to run the restricted driver manager and 'turn them on'.
>  Does that include the recent AMD/ATI video card that Bruce has?
> >From what I recall from list discussions a few months ago, the drivers
> were rather experimental, but they were Open Source.  I thought the
> "restricted driver manager" in Ubuntu was for binary-only drivers.

  Depends on the driver.  Out of the box Ubuntu will use the open
source ati or radeon driver.  If you enable the ATI driver in the
restricted driver manager, it will install and use the fglrx module.
The restricted driver manager is really just a wrapper which works wil
the link-resitrcted-modules package, and ensures that they are being
loaded when requested.  The restricted modules package will sometimes
go out and fetch the binary drivers, or compile a module which is
wrapping a binary only driver, such as the nvidia proprietary driver.
They have gotten MUCH better since from the Feisty release onwards.

Quoted from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI

Instructions for Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy)
Enable accelerated the accelerated ATI graphics driver in the
restricted-manager, then do:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh linux-restricted-modules-`uname -r`
sudo insmod /lib/modules/`uname -r`/volatile/fglrx.ko

-- 
-- Thomas