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I have a HP Pavilion laptop with an AMD Radeon HD 6400M graphic card. When I upgraded from 12.04 to 12.10 all was fine and dandy, until I plugged in my TV via HDMI-cable. After a reboot, Unity stopped working and I was getting all sorts of gpu-related error messages.

Well, I consulted Google and while trying to fix this, I kind of went haywire, adding different repositories to install homebrewed solutions, upgrading and downgrading drivers from AMD:s support page, tinkering with settings and so on. It didn't help.

I finally removed all the mentioned repositories, purged all fglrx files and tried to remove all added drivers, but got some dkpg errors.

The situation right now: Unity doesn't work, but Gnome do. Under 'additional drivers', I have the "Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI: Caicos [Radeon HD 6400M/7400M Series]" driver. I've tried both X.org, fglrx and fglrx-updates, but still, no Unity.

I've given up trying to fix this myself, I'd rather wait for a working update.

Is there a way to completely reset the graphic drivers to installation default, or do I have to re-install Ubuntu 12.10?

(and before anyone mentions it, NO, I don't want to use Gnome, I like Unity and want it to work.)

Jorge Castro
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user103480
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3 Answers3

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Ok, Let me just say I was just looking for reviews on the 12.10 drivers before I install and I'm on Windows 8, so not sure if this will help:

  • I do remember if you go to your Ati Catalyst Control Center.. and this is how it is in windows but it's probably the same for Linux/Ubuntu -in the top right corner it says Preferences - Click on that button and then the fourth one down is - Restore Factory Defaults...

  • Your best bet is probably just go back to 12.04 when everything was fine- just reinstall the 12.04 one from the Ati website.

Evandro Silva
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Crazyglues
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0

This ended up not working for me. There is a better answer at How do I get AMD/Intel Hybrid Graphics drivers to work?

Community
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naught101
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0

It may be the AMD Graphics, perhaps you could use the below to move to Intel Graphics:

edit the /etc/fstab and add the following lines:

tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

none /sys/kernel/debug debugfs defaults 0 0

then edit the /etc/rc.local and add before exit0:

chown $User /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

echo OFF> /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

once you have done that use the attached script & drop it into your /usr/bin folder, and then drop the attached icons into home/$User/.local/share/icons folder

Note: you may want to change the $User in the /home/%User/.local/share/icons element to be the user on your machine. make sure the attached file is executable or it wont work; so either chmod or change permissions by right click.

prior to running the script ensure you have installed gxmessage:

sudo apt-get install gxmessage

To have permanent write permissions to the switch file, add the following line, replacing USERNAME with your username, to /etc/init.d/rc.local:

chown USERNAME /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

then simply run the following command:

switch_between_cards

the switch 1-4 picture attached shows the process and you can see my radeon card is going from off to on to off again

references:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HybridGraphics

In addition to solve some dependencies I have add the following to the top of the script:

if [ $EUID != 0 ]; then
    gksudo "$0" "$@"
    exit $?
fi

Note: Thanks to druellan (i have adapted his addition and removed the gnome-session-quit option)

good luck

hope this helps

Here is a link for the switch script:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1927317&page=3

oneofthemany
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