I managed to break my ATI drivers, what should I do?

Question

Somehow, I managed to break my ATI drivers by trying to install a new driver from AMD's website. I tried uninstalling (amdcccle,fglrx and pretty much everything that seemed related to ATI in Synaptic) / reinstalling many times but I keep getting crashes and my Hardware Drivers utility doesn't even detect the presence of my ATI card anymore.

Is there any way to repair my ATI drivers or will I have to reinstall Ubuntu? I've already spent many hours on this and I'm starting to believe reinstalling will be the easiest.

Answer 1

Don't panic!

You didn't break the drivers a recent security fix did:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer/+bug/642518

It turns out a security fix in the kernel broke the driver. Ubuntu developers are working to fix their version of the fglrx driver however in that bug an ATI developer says you'll have to wait for the next fglrx driver in October (10.10 I guess).

Hopefully we will have the fix to the ubuntu version in the next day or two.

Answer 2

1: If you installed via the shell script (i.e. didn't generated .deb's) you should do

sh /usr/share/fglrx/fglrx-uninstall.sh

After this, you should be able to generate .debs/install via script

2: If you previously had the ati drivers, you should only purge fglrx and autoremove. After that, install the drivers.

NOTE: When you install the drivers a new, try to install them through generating packages. If your distro is lucid you do that like this:

sh ati_driver_script_you_download.sh --buildpkg Ubuntu/lucid

after that

dpkg -i *.deb

Make sure you have these packages installed before building the debs:

1. freetype
2. zlib
3. gcc
4. XFree86-Mesa-libGL
5. libstdc++
6. libgcc
7. XFree86-libs
8. fontconfig

When driver installs, invoke sudo aticonfig --initial.