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Yet another person confused by the ATI/Radeon drivers changes.

To explain, I set up my son's slightly oldish laptop with a fresh install of Ubuntu after I discovered that he hadn't run system updates for years and he was still on Utopic Unicorn. Everything was running ok but I was concerned that it hadn't had security updates since the repos went down. I installed 16.04 because it's the new long time version.

When booting after install, I got a black screen with no backlight. Quick googling revealed I could try dropping down to a basic VESA display in the grub2 kernel command, which did work and I was able to complete the install and configure the system.

However, now I have a laptop with an awful VESA display and freshly-updated packages. My intention was not to trade away his ability to play games, for security fixes.

I know nothing about either Ubuntu (I normally use Gentoo on my personal systems) nor AMD (I always buy nVIDIA cards for my own use).

lspci shows 2 VGA controllers:

00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] BeaverCreek [Radeon HD 6520G]
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Whistler [Radeon HD 6630M/6650M/6750M/7670M/7690M]

I'm not sure why two are listed, I tend to be a little fuzzy with understanding hardware. Is this AMD's version of the Optiumus integrated/discrete pair? On my cheap nVIDIA laptop the integrated graphics card is from Intel.

I do understand that he likely won't have a fantastic experience until some indeterminate period in the future when the open source driver improves. I have read enough to understand I've blithely and obliviously done this update in the middle of a very messy transition period. But is there anything I can do to get an AMD driver working at all (ie: not unlit black screen)? Even if it's just integrated graphics it would be a constructive improvement.

I have installed the xserver-xorg-video-ati driver. 

goldmoon@benjamin-K53TA:~$ xrandr --listproviders
Providers: number : 0

xrandr listproviders shows 0 providers. I'm not sure where to go from here.

You'reAGitForNotUsingGit
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Lurkette
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  • https://askubuntu.com/questions/796067/state-of-amd-drivers-in-16-04 – You'reAGitForNotUsingGit Jul 23 '16 at 02:17
  • I read the contents of the link posted. It's a bullet list of questions about the driver change, with answers that are not relevant to my question (how to get the open source driver working for at least one of the graphics cards on the computer in question). – Lurkette Jul 27 '16 at 21:18
  • I know. That's actually a list of questions asked by me. The "" was because all of this information is jumbled and in random places. – You'reAGitForNotUsingGit Jul 28 '16 at 02:43

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