Older ATI Radeons not supported from fglrx driver above 8.28.8

[Sven Kloe]

Binary package hint: xorg-driver-fglrx

I'm using feisty.
The description of the packages contains the following:
----

Version: 7.1.0-8.32.5+2.6.20.1-6.1
This version of the ATI driver officially supports:
  * ATI Radeon 8500, 9000, 9100, 9200, 9250 (R2xx)
----

But ATI writes the following at this webpage:
http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/radeonprevious-linux.html
---
Release 8.28.8:
August 18, 2006
 Note - This is the last driver version to support the following products:
 Radeon® 8500/9000/9100/9200/9250
 Mobility™ Radeon® 9000/9100/9200
 Radeon® IGP 9000/9100/9200
---

The unsupported Cards should be removed from the package description.

There should be a new package in the feisty Repo i.e. xorg-driver-fglrx-legacy with driver version 8.28.8

This Bug is related to Bug #71106 (and maybe others). Related forum thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=357091&highlight=fglrx

All people who owned one of this cards and want to use dri are affected by this bug.

[Soaa- (sparxcg)]

I myself have a Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP in my laptop, and it's a pity that the new fglrx drivers simply won't load.

Open source driver, you say? I agree that open source is mostly a good thing, but the problem is that AIGLX and radeon drivers are slow for me. I tried all the xorg.conf optimizations floating around, and they don't really help much. I had Xgl+fglrx running fine on Edgy though. It was smooth.

[Tom Gillam (tgilla)]

I also have a Mobility Radeon 9000, and while the open source drivers do work, they are too slow. I have tried and failed to install the 8.28.8 driver directly, with the log reporting that the kernel module cannot be built, so a legacy driver package would be very helpful.

[Ben Collins (ben-collins)]

Yes, the older ATI cards are no longer supported by the fglrx driver. We can't fix that. IIRC, the old ATI driver that does support these cards contains a security bug, so there's not much we can do to help that.

Please contact ATI about this issue. The extent of what we can do to support fglrx is provide it and make sure it compiled with out kernels. Other than that, our hands are tied.

[Sven Kloe (ubuntu-kloe-computer)]

@Gillam: You can compile the ati driver Version 8.28.8. you have to change the shell to /bin/bash:
ln -s /bin/bash /bin/sh
The driver doesn't compile with the standart ubuntu dash-shell.

@Collins: The main problem is the package description. which says that the old chipsets are supported.
For newbies there should be a link to the wiki, howto install the old version by compiling the driver.

[Hector Miuler Malpica Gallegos (miuler)]

Bug related #85907

[Niklas Therning (niklas-therning)]

As a work around for this problem I downgraded x.org to 7.1 and used Envy to install the 8.28.8 driver. Details here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=432554