Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Remove ATI's proprietary drivers

I've installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my beefed-up Compaq Deskpro EN. I have a Hauppauge TV card in it, and also a ATI card to connect a monitor. My LCD-TV has a monitor connection, so I can use a standard cable to connect it to the TV.

After installing Ubuntu 9.04, everything worked fine (of course, it's Linux after all!). Knowing that I have the ATI card, I thought I would try to configure it. I messed around and I think I also installed some ATI-stuff from the Add/Remove-menu.

Anyways - when restaring the computer the next day, it froze when X started. In order to solve this, I used the recovery/safe-boot option, and booted into a root command line session.

Being logged in as root, I didn't have to use "sudo". So, I just removed the ATI driver like this:

aptitude remove xorg-driver-fglrx

Aptitude suggested a solution, and I went for it (fingers crossed).

Rebooting resurrected my X-session and all is now well.

Lesson learned!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this post, I thought I was the only one that Installed that ati thing and had catastrophic visual failure! Helped me a lot!

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this post, I thought I was the only one that Installed that ati thing and had catastrophic visual failure! Helped me a lot!

sassygirl said...

Thanks for your help! It was a lifesaver!