Acer Aspire One 725 - missing graphic card driver for Radeon HD 7290? [closed]

Question

For all you people who THINK they have problem with their Radeons HD.

1) Read carefully what type of Radeon HD card you have. From the internet shop, the specification said that I have a Radeon HD 6290. Which WASN'T true because I have Radeon HD 7290.

2) glxgears doesn't seem to say much or it changed recently. My friend told it's supposed like to have THOUSANDS of frames. in my case it was something below 60 FPS, so there was something wrong with my driver not true!

3) To quickly check if standard drivers are working just download any game using OpenGL and run it. In my case it was openarena. Everything works smoothly!

4) If you get laggy movie playback, install gnome-mplayer. It really helped me a lot, comparing to orignal movie player that came with Ubuntu.

5) However, there are STILL problems with web browsing. It's like Radeon wakes up when it has some real work to do (like OpenGL games).

6) LAST, but NOT LEAST. Don't install fglrx, Catalyst or any drivers before you do a check if your card works. This is VERY important, as this will save your time (for rebooting, changing configuration, running from Live USB, removing packages...).

If you don't do the stuff above, then you will certainly learn a lot abour grub, Xorg, chroot, dpkg, apt-get and package creation [:

Topic closed for the moment!

Answer 1

This was quite involved and nearly gave up actually installed windows 7 on a partition but this worked for me eventually - please din't ask me how or why this worked -I'm new to Linux and not a developer... Followed the instructions here :

http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Natty_Installation_Guide#Removing_Catalyst.2Ffglrx

I had to download the catalyst installler directly from the wiki at http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/12-10

As I got a 404 error in terminal when running the wdget for amd-driver-installer-12-10-x86.x86_64.run.I modified the create .deb script slightly to pick up the downloaded file, and then once the .deb package was created ran the install

Ran Additional Drivers App and installed the driver and restarted. You should probably test using the script - I did'nt and when rebooted had lost all graphics and just left with command line interface.

I then followed the instructions on How do I restore default video drivers? and ran the reboot. I did'nt reinstall the drivers.

Rebooted and graphics working with unity 3D and no choppy video playback - hooray!! but AMD "not supported hardware" watermark at bottom of screen. Ran the script in terminal from :

How-to remove "amd unsupported hardware" without reinstalling the driver? rebooted and done.

What works : Unity 3D, smooth video playbakc Youtube, VLC etc , screen dimming what isn't working : Screen still does'nt dim/switch off after setting inactive period in settings.

hope this helps.