Ubuntu 15.10 stuck on booting after installing proprietary amd graphics drivers?

Question

Ubuntu 15.10 stuck on booting after installing proprietary amd graphics drivers ! My graphics card is amd radeon hd6570.

Ps1: i'm so ungry that I've installed windows 10. Ps2: ....but I've ordered an NVidia GeForce graphics card now so at Tuesday I will install proprietary drivers for NVidia, cause I hate windows. Ps3: I want now to express my opinion as a simple user and not as a programmer, I don't think that a decent operating system should freeze because of such a stupid reason. I know its closed source drives and you can't do anything but at least it should prevent the freeze. anyway

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer/+bug/1493888

Answer 1

From Wily release notes known issues:

AMD's fglrx driver does not work with the current kernel (1493888). It is warmly recommended to uninstall the fglrx driver before upgrading to Ubuntu 15.10. The open source "radeon" driver can be used as a temporary replacement until a fix is available.

Answer 2

If you follow the bug report, it seems to be more a GCC 5.0 issue than a kernel issue (as pointed out by comment #29 which points to this bug). The FGLRX drivers work fine on Ubuntu 15.04 with kernel 4.2.

The workaround involves compiling the driver with gcc 4.9 then freezing it so the package manager will not update it until there's an actual fix. You can try the commands from comment #48 from the from the first link (bug 1493888) if you don't know how to do it yourself. The commenter also appears to have made a deb file so you don't have to go through the headache yourself:

cd /tmp/
apt-get source fglrx-updates
sudo apt-get build-dep fglrx-core
cd fglrx-installer-updates-15.201/
wget -O fix.patch https://launchpadlibrarian.net/219738583/fglrx-installer-15.201_force-gcc_4.9.patch
patch -p1 < fix.patch
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc
cd ../
mkdir fglrx-driver
mv *.deb fglrx-driver/
cd fglrx-driver/
dpkg -i *.deb
sudo amdconfig --initial
sudo apt-mark hold fglrx-updates-core
sudo apt-mark hold fglrx-updates

OR

Download my deb packages here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/m3hbyrs52gb09ur/AABCgiL56W3rQWO-rpyrClXia?dl=0

Here is a copy of the fix.patch file:

diff -ruN fglrx-installer-15.201.orig/debian/dkms/patches/force-gcc_4.9.patch fglrx-installer-15.201/debian/dkms/patches/force-gcc_4.9.patch
--- fglrx-installer-15.201.orig/debian/dkms/patches/force-gcc_4.9.patch 1970-01-01 10:00:00.000000000 +1000
+++ fglrx-installer-15.201/debian/dkms/patches/force-gcc_4.9.patch  2015-10-03 10:48:23.910074578 +1000
@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
+--- a/make.sh  2015-09-21 18:52:07.861911209 +1000
++++ b/make.sh  2015-09-21 18:52:29.339716221 +1000
+@@ -58,4 +58,4 @@ set_GCC_version () {
+ if [ -z "${CC}" ]; then 
+-  CC=gcc
+-  set_GCC_version
++  CC=gcc-4.9
++  #set_GCC_version
+ fi
diff -ruN fglrx-installer-15.201.orig/debian/dkms.conf.in fglrx-installer-15.201/debian/dkms.conf.in
--- fglrx-installer-15.201.orig/debian/dkms.conf.in 2015-08-26 19:34:30.000000000 +1000
+++ fglrx-installer-15.201/debian/dkms.conf.in  2015-10-03 10:49:54.370162151 +1000
@@ -7,7 +7,8 @@
 MAKE[0]="cd ${dkms_tree}/fglrx/#CVERSION#/build; sh make.sh --nohints --uname_r=$kernelver --norootcheck"
 DEST_MODULE_LOCATION[0]="/kernel/drivers/char/drm"
 AUTOINSTALL="yes"
-PATCH[0]="ignore-GCC-mismatch.patch"
+#PATCH[0]="ignore-GCC-mismatch.patch"
+PATCH[0]="force-gcc_4.9.patch"
 PATCH[1]="buildfix_kernel_4.0.patch"
 PATCH[2]="buildfix_kernel_4.1.patch"
 PATCH[3]="buildfix_kernel_4.2.patch"

Answer 3

Ah, gotta love AMD's drivers. This is a (hopefully known) issue that has happened to me, and some others. Currently you'll have to use the open source drivers, or downgrade your kernel (not sure to which version) so that it will be able to boot.

Answer 4

I ran into this problem to, had to boot from a different kernel, replace fglrx with the mesa or xorg drivers but the built in way would not work. So I downloaded a new copy of Lubuntu 15.10, burned it to a usb stick and ran a repair (or is it replace) and that as well failed claiming broken packages. rebooted into my computer and it did boot, but many things were lost. The good news is that I had symlinked all the important stuff to another hard drive a while ago.

It would be nice if there was some warning during the install about ati drivers not working.

Answer 5

All I did is boot in recovery mode and sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx*

This also automatically reactivates the open source drivers (which to be fair are quite good now, I only need fglrx in my development environment because I'm using OpenCL.) My gaming install uses open source drivers because fglrx crashes in kerbal space program. My course of action will probably be to use a previous version of Ubuntu for development... Although I'll probably look into this fix with self-compiling and freezing the driver, but I that's not ideal, and I've never had much luck with manual installs of AMD/ATI drivers, not to mention the additional pain of trying to remove them later.