Joomsy Wrote: [ -> ]Also, I suggest using the open source ATI driver. It's a lot smoother than fglrx and Catalyst.
I have to beg to disagree with you there Joomsy. If you want 3d acceleration and have a recent ATI card, the proprietary drivers are the way to go. Their performance with games is orders of magnitude better than the open source one.
As far as installing the driver goes, If you're having trouble letting Ubuntu install it, I'd suggest trying to install it manually.
grab the driver from here: http://support.amd.com/us/Pages/AMDSupportHub.aspx
then extract it with
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and as root run the .run file with
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when it asks you to generate a package or just install, go with the just install option. You can make a package if you want, but its trivial to uninstall it now that amd bundles an uninstall script with the driver.
then reboot, run
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and you should be good. you should reboot after running the aticonfig command, and then when the machine starts up again you can verify if you installed properly by running
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I've been using fglrx since my first computer with a 4650 card in it (about 4 years now), and its worked installing it that way on every distro I've tried (including Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, and of course, Slackware), and on multiple computers with different graphics cards (worked with a 4650, a 5570, and a 6480).
Tetris, you could always do a simple check to see if the trackpad is just being disabled:
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And I don't know where your brightness keys are on the computer, but if theyre on the keyboard, you could probably just bind a button combo somewhere on the keyboard to make it brighter or darker.