Which proprietary driver should I activate?
I just recently built my own computer, and I am now trying to run Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on it from a flash drive with "casper-rw persistence". I'm very new to the Ubuntu operating system, so I was exploring the settings when I noticed something after using mesa-utils to get my graphics driver recognized.
Ubuntu thought I was using something called "Gallium 0.4 on AMD CAPE VERDE", which is inaccurate as I'm using a Gigabyte Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB video card. So, I went to the Additional Drivers section to download a proper update (as I saw that updating driver's manually wasn't recommended by most on this site)... and found 3.
"Video driver for the AMD graphics accelerators" was listed three times on the list, and with the exact same description on each. I don't know which one to pick, and I would just pick randomly but the last time I did that on this computer it... started having a LOT of problems, including not showing any graphics, not allowing me to click "Try Ubuntu" when I start the computer, and even not loading at all as things got worse.
Is there a way to tell the difference between these three updates? Should I install something manually? And from where?
I do not think you can get the proprietary driver working without doing a standard install. Persistence will save data and changes, and you can install some packages, but it uses a cow (copy on write) so it does not replace a standard installation. This is an example of where persistence will not work.
Once you do an install, each driver should have a version or number associated with it. Choose the highest number.
After installing the driver you typically need to then reboot for the changes to take effect, and this is where persistence fails.
I accept with bodhi.razen's point. Yet I will tell you how to install the driver so that you can try it anyways.
You can install proprietary graphic card driver from this website . Select the appropriate options in that site and you will see the driver for your graphic card. Make sure you install the most recent one. Also check the release notes and installer notes of the graphic card driver before installing. Make sure your OS meets all the system requirements specified in the release notes. Follow the steps in the installer notes to successfully install your driver. You may also have to completely update your OS before graphic driver installation. If you run into problems(Unity crash,low graphics mode and other such issues) after installing your driver, probably, the driver is not acceptable with your OS. In that case try starting a tty session by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1. Type your user name and password. Then type:
sudo aticonfig --uninstall
This will uninstall the driver you installed. Now reboot your system with:
sudo shutdown -r now
Now you will get back unity and you can get a driver that supports your OS.
PS:-
You may use the following commands to check if your OS meets the system requirements of the driver:-
-
uname -ato know your Kernel version -
ldd --versionto know your eglibc version -
Xorg -versionto know Xorg version