Upgraded Ubuntu from 12.04 to 12.10 Ati radeon HD 3450 Catastrophe!

Solution 1:

Ati has removed support for Radeon 2xxx, 3xxx and 4xxx series of graphic cards for their newest drivers, which Ubuntu 12.10 now uses. You need to install AMD's legacy drivers to use these older cards. Here is a blog post which gives several ways to do this. The post's recommended solution, and what worked for me, was to use a 3rd party repository provided by Tomasz Makarewicz. It just required 4 terminal commands.

First though, you need to be able to get access to your applications. Unity glitches under this problem, removing access to the dash, so you should switch to using the GNOME classic desktop environment. You can do this from the login screen, after booting your computer. Click on the small icon to the right of your name, and you should see a dropdown list of desktop options. Select GNOME Classic (No effects). Then logon as usual. You should now have an "applications" menu in the upper left corner of your desktop. Most applications should be in obvious places. To get to the terminal, follow the menu path Applications > Accessories > Terminal.

To install the legacy drivers using Makarewicz's repository, open a terminal and enter the following commands. The first command will require your sudo password, and will also give you a text dump explaining what's going on.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:makson96/fglrx
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install fglrx-legacy

Then restart your computer. Your graphics problems should be fixed.

Solution 2:

It appears that in the recent versions of their proprietary driver AMD dropped support for Radeon 2xxx, 3xxx and 4xxx series of graphic cards. As a result, the new fglrx driver shipped with Ubuntu 12.10 is not compatible with those cards.

You need to uninstall the proprietary driver and use the open-source driver instead.

To uninstall the fglrx driver (more details):

sudo apt-get remove --purge xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx*
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri fglrx-modaliases
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

I don't have an ATI card so I can't test the steps. You can find more info at Ubuntu Wiki: Proprietary driver, Opensource driver

Solution 3:

Take a deep breath. Calm down.

Here's what we're going to do - save all your personal settings and reinstall ubuntu from scratch.

Now go find or burn a copy of ubuntu, 12.10 will do, or 12.04, and a USB drive. Boot into it.

Now you have a working linux install from the livecd(I hope!), and you will need to open the drive with your old install of linux. This should be automounted, if not, comment and I will edit to tell you how to access it.

You need to copy the contents of /home from the old install (this should show up as a drive or drives in the livecd)- Copy everything as this contains any settings specific to your install, and a good chunk of your personal preferences. Upload what you want to, now. Copy anything else you need. Ideally you'd also want to retrieve a list of what additional stuff you have installed, but I can't remember how to do that off hand from another install. If you can't read /home, it gets tricky, and you'd selected an encrypted partition. There's probably a way to access it, but that might need you to boot into the old install, and use the command line.

Now comes the slightly scary part. Its too much work to fix a borked upgrade. Wipe and reinstall those linux partitions as per normal, with the same usernames. Copy /home back in place (i'd probably leave out anything specific to unity, or if I REALLY wanted to play it save probably copy just the desktop folder and some directories starting with a . - these are hidden directories with program specific files). Boot into the new install and install whatever packages you need.