AMD Catalyst Display Driver Now Works On Hybrid Graphics Laptops

Today was a great day for me and I hope for others as well. The day has arrived that the official AMD Catalystâ„¢ Proprietary Display Driver for Linux x86 and Linux x86_64 now works on laptops/notebooks with hybrid graphics.. . AGAIN!

The latest release of AMD graphics driver is version 12.1. What’s new? AMD officially does not provide release notes for the Linux driver. Only Windows gets that. However, Phoronix has you covered as always. Head on to their site and read the news by clicking on that link.

Okay, for those of you who don’t want to read, here’s the gist for Phoronix’s article about the 12.1 driver this month –  “nothing to exciting”.

What really has got me up and alive and blogging today is the fact that I finally got the proprietary drivers to run on my laptop (The title of this post makes it quite obvious). I’ve been trying to do this on previous versions since last year without any success so I was forced to use the Intel graphics on my Ubuntu 11.04. The latter works okay, is enough for Unity Desktop 3D, and a few games.

Today, however, it worked! But not after scratching my head more than a dozen times and almost banging it to the wall. Gladly, I read around and, as always, there are a lot (or a few) of valuable information on the Internet.

You see, after I installed the driver and rebooting Ubuntu, I got the dreaded black screen after the system reached GDM yet again. This has been always the case for the previous driver versions, and no amount of tweaking the xorg.conf file managed to get the damn driver to work on my laptop. What made me not give up this time is the fact that a guy commented on some forum  that the 12.1 driver “works” on his AMD+Intel hybrid graphics latop.

What I did to make it work? Just three simple steps. I issued the following commands:

sudo amdconfig –initial

sudo amdconfig –tls=0

sudo amdconfig –acpi-services=off

To know more about the above commands and on how to properly install the AMD Catalyst driver for Ubuntu Natty Narwhal,  read this guide. Everything is in there.

If you don’t have the driver yet, what are you waiting for? Head on over to the AMD site and download it now.

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Notice: This article was published on January 28, 2012 and the content above may be out of date.
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