installing radeon card under debian

Question

I have this lenovo z575 with radeon HD 6520G. I have installed Crunchbang Linux and want to configure the video card. I installed open drivers (x-server-xorg...) and nothing. I purged them, installed closed drivers (from the repository), restarted - and still nothing. All the time I run in fallback mode.

What is wrong? How to install and configure the driver

Answer 1

First things first, DO NOT UNINSTALL xserver-xorg-video-ati. It's just not a good idea, even if you use FGLRX. If you already removed it, then you should reinstall it ASAP.

Next you should install FGLRX. I have not used crunchbang in a long time, so i'm not sure if they offer FGLRX drivers in some package. If you can find a package, try it first before doing the manual installation. If no package exists, or when installed does not support your card, you need to download the installer from the AMD drivers web page. Good installation instructions are very established online, remember crunchbang is Debian based.

When you have finished installing FGLRX, and have restarted your computer, verify they are installed correctly with this command.

fglrxinfo

my workstation output, looks like this...

display: :0  screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 5670
OpenGL version string: 4.1.11251 Compatibility Profile Context

As long as yours says "Advanced Micro Devices, Inc." and not MESA, you should be in good shape.

You should also just test your opengl output, with this command.

fgl_glxgears

If you are having trouble, comment and I'll help.

Answer 2

Chances are that you are blindly believing your card must be supported by all these drivers. I'd guess all of the following is happening at once:

• Your card, codenamed Turke, requires linux version 2.6.38 or newer. There are also several FLOSS drivers for AMD cards -- there's still the older (UMS) driver, which does not even list Northern Islands in the feature matrix. You need to check if the driver you are trying to use is the newer incarnation of the driver, the KMS one, that any out-of-kernel parts are new enough to bring any required Northern Islands–related stuff and that the version of linux (kernel) you are running is one with the driver (trusting the driver page, ≥2.6.38)

• AMD mades proprietary drivers available, which include support for several cards at once. These drivers are given version numbers, and newer cards are added in newer versions, with some older cards getting dropped in some of these releases (a funny approach, I know). Check if the version of the driver offered in the repository actually includes support for your card (I guess you can ask the package manager for the version number and go check at the AMD web page, if your distro does not maintain such a list).

So, before trying to install and configure the driver, check if the driver you want to install and configure actually supports the card you want to use with it.

(You could always try installing the drivers directly from AMD, but beware that, as these are binary, closed source drivers, while the distro maintainers can assure that the repository version at least seems to work well with the other system components, there is no way you can be sure the newest drivers from upstream work, that you won't get crashes or stability issues.)