At this point I quit in frustration and just ran the ATI installer. That worked (apparently) and I notice the libglx.so file has been replaced with one installed at the time I was running the ATI installer.

The screen isn’t flickering the way it did with the vesa driver, so something has changed, but windows are slow to move and don’t go semi-transparent in the process like they used to. Something still needs to be tweaked.

Also, this step failed with the following errors:
dpkg-shlibdeps: error: couldn’t find library libc.so.6 needed by debian/fglrx-driver/emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libfglrx_pp.so.1.0 (ELF format: ‘elf32-i386′; RPATH: ”).
Note: libraries are not searched in other binary packages that do not have any shlibs or symbols file.
To help dpkg-shlibdeps find private libraries, you might need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
dh_shlibdeps: dpkg-shlibdeps returned exit code 2
make: *** [binary] Error 1
dpkg-buildpackage: error: debian/rules binary gave error exit status 2

The lack of a libc.so.6 was the problem. After fixing this, I came to another error complaining about fglrx_gamma… I found the solution at http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Hardy_Installation_Guide#Fix_for_an_error which basically involves extracting the driver then setting a link to the package – the shell script seems to be looking for a misnamed package. After that, the buildpkg worked – leaving me with 4 packages.

Will keep you posted on whether I got a successful install or not.

The “ATI Catalyst™ Display Driver” released in March 26 2009 do not need to kernel sources be downloaded.

In fact, some conditions applies:

1) The drivers above support English only.
2) The display driver requires POSIX shared memory to be enabled on the system.
3) Kernal Sources package is no longer required if Kernel Header package is installed.
4) 32-Bit packages must be installed for 64-Bit Linux drivers to install or work.

Info extracted from: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Legacy/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx?type=2.7&product=2.7.4.3.3.3.1&lang=English

Hope this helps.

xt4mhz

You can also use sgfxi to move between free and non-free drivers or roll back to native free drivers: Key commands are:

-n Automatically installs correct native xorg nv, intel, or ati driver for your
system. Cleans up old binary driver stuff, updates xorg.conf with new driver
information, and cleans nvidia and fgrlx stuff out of xorg.conf
-N Force install of specific xorg driver.
Syntax: sgfxi -N
Supported Xorg drivers: ati i128 i740 i810 i810-modesetting intel mga
neomagic nv radeon radeonhd sis tdfx vesa vga voodoo
Also configures xorg.conf as required. Full radeon xorg 3d configuration
automatically.
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