Installing the ATI driver on Debian GNU / Linux

Intro

A long time ago, when I started using Linux, I tried several distributions and settled on Debian. Since I don’t play games that much, I immediately liked the GNOME desktop because of its simplicity and convenience, and the system worked faster than Windows. After installing the system, all the devices were identified, except for the video card - at that time I had an ATI Radeon 9800 SE.

Installing the driver as in Windows suffered a fiasco right after I was surprised to find that there was no Debian in the interface to the installer, and if I chose Ubuntu, then everything died.

Then I spent about a week installing the 8.6 version. Since then, I changed the computer, but I am a fan of AMD and the next video card I took was the Radeon HD4850.
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Getting started

In the first installation you will need the driver itself. At the moment, the latest version is 10.5. After it is loaded, unpack the contents into the fglrx directory:

./ati-driver-installer-10-5-x86.x86_64.run --extract fglrx

Note: the driver with post fix "x86.x86_64" is suitable for both 32 and 64-bit systems.

First, you need to change the ati-packager.sh script. For lenny :

cp ./fglrx/packages/Debian/ati-packager.sh ./ati-packager.sh
cat ./ati-packager.sh | sed -e 's/X_DIR=x710; X_NAME=lenny/X_DIR=x690; X_NAME=lenny/' > ./fglrx/packages/Debian/ati-packager.sh

For squeeze :

cp ./fglrx/packages/Debian/ati-packager.sh ./ati-packager.sh
cat ./ati-packager.sh | sed -e 's/X_DIR=x710; X_NAME=lenny/X_DIR=x750; X_NAME=lenny/' > ./fglrx/packages/Debian/ati-packager.sh

Thus, the indication of a non-existent version of the X-s in the distribution will be changed to the version supported by the system.

Secondly, you need to change the rules script, the changes are the same for lenny and squeeze :

cp ./Desktop/fglrx/packages/Debian/dists/lenny/rules rules
cat ./rules | sed -e 's/^\tdh_shlibdeps$/#\tdh_shlibdeps/' > ./fglrx/packages/Debian/dists/lenny/rules

Note: without this, when assembling packages, an error will appear that there is no libatiuki.so.1 library. There is an opinion that if you create a link to this library, then everything will be assembled without problems. It didn't work for me. It is also believed that changing the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH can help, but this also did not work for me.

Now you need to copy the necessary library into / usr / lib /:

For 32 bits:

cp ./fglrx/arch/x86/usr/lib/libatiuki.so.1.0 /usr/lib/libatiuki.so.1

For 64 bits:

cp ./fglrx/arch/x86_64/usr/lib64/libatiuki.so.1.0 /usr/lib/libatiuki.so.1

Preparation for assembly is complete.

Build Packages

Now you need to install the following packages:

aptitude install debhelper module-assistant

Next, the module-assistant will pull up all the necessary packages, including the kernel sources:

module-assistant prepare

Also for the latest drivers, libqtcore4 is required. Next, the build package should pass without errors:

./ati-installer.sh 10.5 --buildpkg Debian/lenny

After which the packages should appear:

• fglrx-amdcccle
• fglrx-driver
• fglrx-driver-dev
• fglrx-kernel-src

You can install them as follows:

dpkg --install —force-all *.deb

Note: there is also a gdebi utility that allows you to put packages with dependencies. I use dpkg out of habit.

Module assembly

Going module in one command:

module-assistant auto-install fglrx

After a reboot, we have:

Conclusion

I wrote from memory, since I last put Debian a couple of months ago on the purchased ASUS K40AB laptop. In the described way, the drivers were set to cheers, the recent update of the free radeonhd driver caused a conflict that was fixed in a couple of minutes. I checked the installation on Debian lenny and squeeze on 32 and 64 bit systems.

PS: I wrote from memory so that errors are possible, but the essence is as follows.