How to Install ATI/AMD Catalyst Linux Driver 11.6 in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

When it comes to VGA cards... Nvidia and ATI are the dominating manufactures of GPUs (graphical processing unit). Unlike with a CPU where you don't have to install any "driver" since the operating system (GNU/Linux, MS Windows, etc) Kernel contains optimized drivers by default... a GPU can be a bit tricky.

Although Intel has a long range of their own GPUs which are also quite powerful but still when comparing with the ATI and Nvidia, they're slightly behind. But one thing about the Intel graphic cards is that, unlike with Ati/Nvida, Intel has a bit of an open minded approach.

This is because they give a lot of information about the architecture of their GPU, etc for Kernel developers which enable the GNU/Linux Kernel developers to easily embed and create GPU/VGA drivers of their own without having to depend on Intel for updates and bug-fixes.

Unfortunately this not is the case with ATI and Nvidia drivers since they refuse to give information regarding the GPU structure, etc which is an essential if you want to embed their GPU support to the GNU/Linux Kernel.

And as a result, now if you want the optimum performance from your ATI/Nvidia GPU (which you should since Unity and other desktop heavily use the 3D acceleration of your GPU), then we have to wait till the manufactures fix them.

Enough "complaining", lets get busy.

Now recently AMD/ATI released a new update to their Catalyst Linux "version" which makes it now the 11.6. If you use Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, you can install the Catalyst 11.6 quite easily by following the below steps.

Trying to be "friendly" ;-)...

1. First we have to download the driver it self. So open your Terminal and enter the below command.

 cd ~/; mkdir catalyst11.6; cd catalyst11.6/

 wget http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-11-6-x86.x86_64.run

 chmod +x ati-driver-installer-11-6-x86.x86_64.run

2. Now lets create an executable .deb package by entering the below command in your Ubuntu Linux Terminal.

sudo sh ./ati-driver-installer-11-6-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/natty

3. Finally issue the below command which should install it in Natty (hopefully :P).

sudo dpkg -i fglrx*.deb

Now we have successfully installed the AMD/ATI Catalyst GPU driver in Ubuntu 11.04!. See, how easy it is learning to use Linux, fast! :D.

Update: although this may not be necessary for all the users but after the installation you may also want to run the below command to update the X.org file (the one that's behind the most basic GUI windows system known as X-Windows in GNU/Linux). As said, most wouldn't need it.

sudo aticonfig --initial -f 

Linux Kernel 3.0 RC1 is Officially Released!

Few hours ago, someone called Linus Torvalds :P released the first ever version 3.0 of Linux Kernel!, which took some long long time. Although before anyone gets too excited, according to Mr. Linus... this does not bring any new features. But that's not to say that the Kernel 3.0 doesn't bring anything new.

As usual, concerning hardware drivers ... to the 3.0 RC, they've added few GPU driver updates, bug fixes of VM, VFS cleanups, few ARM consolidations, AMD fusion and Intel platform enhancements and finally the support for Microsoft Kinect Linux driver are added (the notable ones).

So, if there are no "major" features available, then why the heck they released it?.

"I'm actually older than I look :)"...

Well... to quote Linus himself...

"We've been doing time-based releases for many years now, this is in no way about features.If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one ('20 years') instead..."

Basically it took Kernel developers roughly around 14-15 years to jump from the version 2 to the 3. I guess that they just wanted to start with a stable "number" and move steady rather than adding lot of features all of a sudden and making things "complicated". 

Since the latest 3.0 version is at its RC (release candidate) stage... it should interesting which distribution/s has the courage to ship it with their OS and let user get a "taste" of this latest release of the GNU/Linux despite of all these "no new features" talks :). Oh, btw, you can download it from this official Kernel release page.