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I'm new to Ubuntu, thought I'd try it and installed the latest version (13.10).

My laptop has switchable graphics cards, ATI (AMD) and Intel, and Ubuntu seems to use the Intel by default and I cannot figure out how to switch to the ATI card to save my life.

I searched around for hours, but any relevant threads I managed to find were for much earlier versions of Ubuntu and seemed outdated. For example, I found some mention of switching cards using Ubuntu control center. All download links seem to lead nowhere.

The only thing current I found is this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HybridGraphics, which suggests using vga_switcheroo. Of course, it tells me that it won't work if you boot with nomodeset..which I have to do, otherwise, I get a black screen. So that rules that out.

Is there any other way I can switch to my ATI card? (I'm using the open-source driver, as installing anything else causes problems)

Thanks in advance.

1 Answer 1

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Some Info: Switchable graphics are not supported in ubuntu, at least not the real thing. In order to switch from Intel to AMD and vice versa you have to open Catalyst Control Center and switch it from there manually and then do a restart (Which sucks).

I hope that will change sometime soon.

Also, I play a game called Second Life after I installed the drivers, I could only run it with the AMD card, not with Intel.

Before the installation of the drivers tho, I DID manage to run the game with Intel card. Not sure why and how that happened. But I thought I should warn you about stuff.

INSTALLATION

You can download the drivers from Here

Select Notebook, Radeon HD, then your AMD graphics card model then OS (yeah obvious stuff).

NOTICE: Replace the lame names I put for explaining with actual names and locations

When the file is downloaded, open a terminal and go to the downloaded file location:

cd ~/downloaded/file/location/goes/here

extract its contents with:

unzip downloaded-file-name-goes-here

change the permissions of the extracted file to allow execution: chmod 775 extracted-file-name=goes-here

And install it with:

sudo ./extracted-file-name-goes-here

When the Installer dialog appears, select: Install Driver xx.xxx on X.Org x.x or later 64-bit (or 32 bit, depends on your system) Don't try to generate Ubuntu specific package, I did and it failed.

For my system, ubuntu 12.04 the commands I had to type are:

cd ~/Downloads
unzip amd-catalyst-13.12-linux-x86.x86_64.zip
chmod 775 amd-catalyst-13.12-linux-x86.x86_64.run
sudo ./amd-catalyst-13.12-linux-x86.x86_64.run

Then follow the steps above (clicking doesn't need much explanation)

If there are any extra steps, i don't think it will be hard to figure them out.

And that's about it all.

Hope this helped and Good Luck.

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