The Linux Experiment

As of version 12.10, Ubuntu has upgraded the version of X.org they include to the latest and unfortunately it is no longer compatible with the official ATI Catalyst drivers for some cards, specifically the HD2xxx, 3xxx and 4xxx models. The open source driver is the only officially supported alternative and, while it is fine for most uses, it doesn’t support the advanced power settings that the ATI driver does. This means that on my laptop in particular the fan runs constantly as it tries to cool down the overheating card.

So… no Ubuntu 12.10+ then?

Thankfully someone has created a PPA that successfully downgrades the version of X.org to the maximum supported version for the official ATI driver. This step is obviously quite drastic and should not be used on production systems. However from the limited time that I have been running it things seem pretty stable. The PPA (and instructions) can be found at this link: AMD Catalyst Legacy

Tonight, I finally got X11 working on my Gentoo machine. For those who are following along, on Tuesday night I managed to get my machine up to a command line. The next logical step is a graphical window manager.

I’ve chosen to give Gnome3 a spin, but before I can dive into all of it’s shiny UI-goodness, I need an X11 server installed on my machine. Because I have an nVidia graphics card in my machine, and I’ve had great luck with Ubuntu’s proprietary nVidia drivers in the past, I decided to skip over the open-source Nouveau drivers this time around. I started out the installation by following Gentoo’s nVidia guide, supplementing with info pulled from the nVidia entry on the Gentoo Wiki.

Although X is supposed to configure your system automagically, it couldn’t find my screens or devices on my first run of startx. I looked about the internet for a bit, and found out that you can force X to automatically configure itself. Simply run Xorg -configure and copy the file that it creates into your Xorg config directory (you can find it in the log file, mine is at /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/).

In my case, these automagical settings still needed a bit of tweaking. I noticed in the log file (again, mine is at /var/log/Xorg.0.log, your mileage may vary) that X was failing to load GLX, which is essentially for 3D acceleration. In my case, GLX was installed, but it NVIDIA’s version wasn’t being loaded. Once again, the Gentoo Wiki came through for me, instructing me to run eselect opengl set nvidia. This worked like a charm.

Finally, I had to install twm and xterm so that I could see X working. That was a quick and painless process. Now on to Gnome!