The open driver applied in Ubuntu 11.10 by default for ATI's Radeon HD 6310 works fairly well. It detects my secondary display, the resolutions for both it and built in display [Thinkpad x120e], and maps them fairly well with limited overlap.
Users, however, are given two options from the 'Additional Drivers' dialogue:
- ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver (post-release updates)
- ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver
The former cannot be installed. The latter can, but once installed garbles bootscreen dimensions, and no longer detects displays. When implemented with Gnome-Shell rather than Unity, titlebar colors are distorted, and Gnome-Shell glitches between it and the underlying "fallback" environment, live.
Removal of the proprietary driver causes complete removal of Gnome-Shell and corruption of Unity and Unity-2D. Gnome-fallback works in limited capacity.
The third party driver from ATI's web page, installed with default options, does not seem to work.
All I really want to do is output to external display only. Which driver I use doesn't matter, although the Catalyst stuff would probably be best for the promise of increased performance. Any thoughts/feedback?