Installing drivers for radeon hd4350

[Mosheingun]

I just built myself a new 64bit computer, but I'm having a little trouble getting it going. At first I put windows 7 on it, but it requires 1gb of RAM just to run it's basic programs, and it's all bogged down with all these useless programs, and when I tried to turn off some programs to make it faster, half my stuff stopped working all together, because they required all these programs just to run other programs, it's just absolutely ridiculous.

So I looked into Linux, and after asking around a bit, I installed Debian. It's exactly what I want in an operating system, completely customizable, but I guess I've been spoiled by microsoft and I'm not that good with all the command lines and configuring the kernel.

Righty now I'm trying to get my video card going, but I can't even figure out how to get the drivers installed. I went to amd.com and got the drivers, but when I try to just put them in the bin, but it keeps telling me I don't have administrator priveleges, but I do. Then I tried following this manual wiki.debian.org/Manual-Howto#Atibinarydriver]Manual-Howto - Debian Wiki , but I got stuck at the part where it tells me to copy and edit my xorg.config. When I go to copy, it tells me the directory doesn't exist, but it does. And when I go to edit the xorg.config, it tells me I don't have priveleges again.

So is there any easy way to get my video card installed, or do I really have to create this new kernel and go through this whole long process? My motherboard has hybrid crossfire technology, am I able to use that with debian?

Here is what I have in my comp, in case the info is needed.

Debian Release 5.0.4 (lenny) Kernel Linux 2.6.26-2-amd64 GNOME 2.22.3
MSI KA780G mothboard
2x1gb ddr2 pc2-5300
AMD Athlon II 2.8ghz Quad Core 630
1gb pci-e radeon hd4350

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I would really like to have my monitor display more than 16 colors, lol.

-TJ-

[reed9]

You'll need to open whichever text editor you're using as root to edit xorg.conf.

For small edits like this, I prefer just using nano, a command line text editor.

su -c 'nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf'

You do need to go through all of this to get the proprietary non-free driver installed in Debian. Some other distros make installing non-free software easier, such as Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Those distros include an automated installer for non-free hardware drivers.

[Mosheingun]

But how do I get past the whole administrator priveleges thing? Is there a certain way I have to login or something? And how do I actually put the driver in there? In that manual it says to delete the old kernel before you mount the new one, but it says it should say the name of the old kernel or driver or whatever and it should be radeon or ati or something, but ai don't see that anywhere, where does it say?

[reed9]

From the terminal, you can log in as root (or in fact other users on the system) using su.

You can run a single command with su -c as I did above, or login as root either with

su

or

su -

The latter is usually preferably for reasons I won't go into much here, but briefly it changes the working environment to that of the new user.

To launch graphical programs as root, it is best to use gksu. If it isn't installed, do

su -
aptitude install gksu
exit

Then launch the program from the command line or run dialogue (usually accessed with ALT+F2) and enter

gksu nameofprogram

The open source radeon kernel module is likely loading automatically. To replace it with the closed fglrx driver, you need to remove and probably blacklist the radeon driver.
You can see loaded modules with

lsmod

You can remove a module that isn't in use with (su to root as above)

modprobe -r radeon

You can insert a new module with

modprobe fglrx

To blacklist a driver, add a line to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf like so

blacklist radeon

to force a module to load at boot, at a line to /etc/modules with the name of the module, in this case fglrx.