Ubuntu
fglrx-installer package

updating to Quantal breaks the system with Radeon HD 4200

Bug #1068434 reported by skipper on 2012-10-19

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #1068739: [fglrx] logging in after dist-upgrade results in broken ui. Edit Remove

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	fglrx-installer (Ubuntu)	Invalid	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

Upgrading from Precise breaks the whole system as Unity does not start.

I managed to install icewm, that's how I can use the computer now.

I tried the PPA https://launchpad.net/~makson96/+archive/fglrx but it did not work.

I tried to install the previous Catalyst driver manually, but it simply does not compile. So I'm stuck.

Surely Radeon HD 4200 is not the newest card, but it is not that old.

Revision history for this message

skipper (attila-egri-nagy) wrote on 2012-10-19:

lspci information Edit (2.3 KiB, text/plain)

Revision history for this message

Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131) wrote on 2012-10-20:

Marking Invalid. AMD has dropped the RadeonHD 4x00 series from fglrx support. The last version of fglrx to support your card is 8.960 (and this version will not work in Quantal/12.10).

You must use the open-source radeon (or go back to using precise/12.04 if you want to use Catalyst).

If you experience issues with the open-source driver, please file a new bug. Thanks.

Changed in fglrx-installer (Ubuntu):
status:	New → Invalid

Revision history for this message

skipper (attila-egri-nagy) wrote on 2012-10-20:

Hey Dave,

Thanks for the answer! Now I can better phrase what the problem is.

I don't care too much about 3D (no gaming for instance) but I use unity. If this was known before and going back to the open-source driver is an option then why is it not done during the upgrade?

What happened here is that for my production machine I postponed the upgrade until the release was done. I have a couple of other machines on which I do alpha/beta testing and they all looked good. Unfortunately none of them is an ATI machine.

So after the release I did the upgrade and all I got was just the cursor after logging in. For many years I upgraded several machines, from several ubuntu versions, but I 've never seen such a harsh failure before. So maybe this is a bug for the upgrade process, which package is that?

Please forgive my ignorance, but what is the preferred way to revert back to the radeon driver? Or shall it be done through xorg.conf?

Thanks!

Revision history for this message

Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131) wrote on 2012-10-20:

Actually, you should probably remove xorg.conf completely, as it shouldn't be needed for the open-source driver. See: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Quantal_Installation_Guide#Removing_Catalyst.2Ffglrx

When you upgrade, Ubuntu is going to upgrade whatever packages you have installed (including fglrx). I don't think it's smart enough to see that you have a video card no longer supported by fglrx and act accordingly. I've filed a new bug for you here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-release-upgrader/+bug/1069237