Ubuntu Video Problems or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Installing ATI Drivers

I've finally gotten around to fixing my broken Ubuntu desktop. It required a reinstallation of ATI video drivers for my Radeon X1900 card. The Situation: I had installed a fresh copy of 8.04 just after it came out, and I updated via the update manager as updates became available. A couple months ago, I installed some updates which upgraded me to kernel version 2.6.24-19-generic. I don't know what else changed, but after this I couldn't get to the desktop. I removed gdm from the init scripts so I could work at the command line. Every time I tried to run startx, though, it would first go to the grey/black and white check background with the "X" mouse cursor, then to a plain white screen with the normal Gnome mouse cursor. The mouse was responsive, but there was only the white screen. Hitting Alt+Tab would show the outline of what appeared to be a dialog box with the outline of the "task switch" panel in front of it. Hitting enter would make the dialog go away so that this didn't happen anymore and I was just stuck with the plain white screen. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace would make the desktop appear for an instant before dropping me back to the command line. The Resolution: Googling led me in a few different directions, and I tried things like trying to reset my xorg.conf via dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. This generated a basic xorg.conf, but it also failed with this error about a battery: FATAL: Error inserting battery (/lib/modules/2.6.24-19-generic/kernel/drivers/acpi/battery.ko): No such device ??? This is a desktop! Obviously there's no battery! I never figured out what was up with that. Anyway, the new, very small xorg.conf didn't make anything different happen. I also tried updating a couple times along the way with: apt-get update apt-get upgrade Still no dice. Previous experience had taught me that, regardless of which OS you're using, if you have weird problems like this, there's a better-than-even chance that it's got something to do with the video drivers, so I thought I'd try updating those. The Unofficial Wiki for the ATI Linux Driver was very handy in this regard. I found it linked on the ATI driver page when I went there to download the driver. Of course, downloading and installing the driver yourself is considered the Hard Way, but I've done it once before, and it was the automatic way that got me in this predicament. The wiki has instructions for multiple version of multiple distros, including a page for Ubuntu 8.04. I followed the instructions along to the "Install .debs" step before I hit my first problem. The problem was that I had conflicting packages installed because while I was waiting for the driver to download, I had installed Envy with the intent of trying to have it straighten out my drivers for me. I never tried it though, opting instead to handle the installation myself. It turns out, though, that in installing it, several packages had been added that got in the way of the packages that the driver wanted to install. Removing the Envy packages let the driver packages install fine, but at the very end, I got this error message: [fglrx:firegl_init_module] *ERROR* firegl_stub_register failed Further Googling led me to a forum thread that mentioned that trying to install the fglrx module (the ATI drivers) with modprobe fglrx is what causes this error. I tried running that command, and sure enough, I got the same message. The thread also mentioned that modules "radeon" and "drm" seem to get in the way of fglrx, and removing them allows modprobe fglrx to work. lsmod showed that I also had the two modules in question installed, so I crossed my fingers (I had no idea what would happen) and removed them with rmmod radeon and rmmod drm, then ran the entire installation process again, just to be safe. This time it went fine. I started on my way down the checklist again, and when I got to sudo aticonfig --initial -f, I realized that this is something I should have tried in the first place, since this generates an xorg.conf file with all the right ATI stuff in it. Oh well. After finishing the checklist, my desktop is back, and this is the first blog post I've made from Ubuntu. Woohoo! P.S. The title of this post is a reference to one of the greatest movies ever: Dr. Strangelove.