ATI on Ubuntu

When I had upgraded everything was ready on the screen om my computer and with my 12.04 ubuntu.

When I restarted my system, the graphics card was not detected. I was forced to start the computer in low graphics mode, and eventually I had a pink deskop with only my maps, and no other programs at all.

What do I do now? I need to recover the pictures on my system so that I can upload them online.

I'd done a graphics card test on the terminal initially, and it showed that the card was compatible with unity 3D. I have an ATI radeon HD 3450 and I was running a 32 bit build of Ubuntu 12.04 initially

Right now I have a broken install of Linux, with no working graphics card or desktop to start from, so I'm unsure of how to fix this.



Ati has removed support for Radeon 2xxx, 3xxx and 4xxx series of graphic cards for their newest drivers, which Ubuntu 12.10 now uses. You need to install AMD's legacy drivers to use these older cards. Here is a blog post which gives several ways to do this. The post's recommended solution, and what worked for me, was to use a 3rd party repository provided by Tomasz Makarewicz. It just required 4 terminal commands.

First though, you need to be able to get access to your applications. Unity glitches under this problem, removing access to the dash, so you should switch to using the GNOME classic desktop environment. You can do this from the login screen, after booting your computer. Click on the small icon to the right of your name, and you should see a dropdown list of desktop options. Select GNOME Classic (No effects). Then logon as usual. You should now have an "applications" menu in the upper left corner of your desktop. Most applications should be in obvious places. To get to the terminal, follow the menu path Applications > Accessories > Terminal.

To install the legacy drivers using Makarewicz's repository, open a terminal and enter the following commands. The first command will require your sudo password, and will also give you a text dump explaining what's going on.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:makson96/fglrx
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install fglrx-legacy

Then restart your computer. Your graphics problems should be fixed.


It appears that in the recent versions of their proprietary driver AMD dropped support for Radeon 2xxx, 3xxx and 4xxx series of graphic cards. As a result, the new fglrx driver shipped with Ubuntu 12.10 is not compatible with those cards.

You need to uninstall the proprietary driver and use the open-source driver instead.

To uninstall the fglrx driver (more details):

sudo apt-get remove --purge xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx*
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri fglrx-modaliases
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg


I don't have an ATI card so I can't test the steps. You can find more info at Ubuntu Wiki: Proprietary driver, Opensource driver