Ati drivers-ugh

[Varean]

I installed the ATI drivers exactly as http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=408111 <----This wiki said. I rebooted and at fglrxconfig, I get a message saying I am using the Mesa 3D stuff. I did it all correctly with no errors, so why isn't my ATI Radeon 9600's driver in use?

[spencerf]

this is a quote from one of my previous posts taken from another web page. By the way I checked out the thread you were using it is 34 pages are you sure that you read through all of it. Because I read through the first 8 pages and found that they believe this problem to be with opengl libraries as I suspected. Make sure you do your homework there is a lot of information on that thread.

Discussion

If using $ fglrxinfo after installing fglrx indicates that you are still using the mesa indirect software GL renderer, you likely have some misplaced softlinks. It seems like it has to do with an apt-get upgrade that sometimes replaces these links. Anyway, go to

# cd /usr/X11R6/lib

and list your GL libraries and links

# ls -la *GL*

You should see something like the following two lines amoung others:

libGL.so -> libGL.so.1.2
libGL.so.1 -> libGL.so.1.2

If you see a link to a mesa library (something like ... -> libGL.mesa.1.2), then that's your problem! Restore the softlink like this (use your actual library version, though):

# ln -s libGL.so.1.2 libGL.so.1

For some reason, this link might "break" later, giving you the software rendering once more. Even after renaming the mesa library to something like mesa.bkup, the system might still find it and link to it despite the name change. If you have to do this a lot, you could write a restoreGL script.

[antidrugue]

I installed the ATI drivers exactly as http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=408111 <----This wiki said.

I don't know about this "wiki" of yours, but with Ubuntu/Kubuntu I always installed ATI drivers like that and it never failed. It is pretty straight forward...

4 easy steps:

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
echo fglrx |sudo tee -a /etc/modules
sudo sed -i -e 's/"ati"/"fglrx"/' /etc/X11/xorg.conf

... and reboot.