[Closed] Installing Radeon 3000 series under Debian9

[qyron]

Can someone spare me a little help with this? I've tried following the guide in the Debian Wiki but the system simply flipped me and told the backports for Wheezy, where the version 13.1 for ATI is available, is not signed and therefore disabled.

[stevepusser]

Could you be more exact in what happened than the "system flipped me"? I see in my mind's eye the computer sliding its keyboard under you like a spatula and flipping you like a pancake.

After I call upon the mystic spirits of the aethernet--sim-sim-salabim-- they whisper to me that you are trying to install the AMD proprietary driver on Debian Stretch. Is this correct, or are they full of crap again?

[qyron]

Could you be more exact in what happened than the "system flipped me"?

Yes, I can. I will do so in a moment, after I'm done laughing

I see in my mind's eye the computer sliding its keyboard under you like a spatula and flipping you like a pancake.

+1. Heck, take as many as you want. That was funny.

After I call upon the mystic spirits of the aethernet--sim-sim-salabim-- they whisper to me that you are trying to install the AMD proprietary driver on Debian Stretch. Is this correct, or are they full of crap again?

Yes. I have a onboard Radeon 3000 that I want to run on the proprietary drivers. Under Debian 8, it boosted the overall performance of the system quite a bit, as I was able to more smoothly some resource hungrier programs than I could without.

Unfortunately, and according to the Debian Wiki, the driver for this chip is only available in the Debian 7 repositories. I've tried following the instructions available and the system replied the repository was unsigned and therefore was automatically disabled.

[stevepusser]

Wow, the spirits did their job this time. The proprietary fglrx-driver was abandoned some time ago by AMD in favor of the open amdgpu driver, which only supports newer cards. Fglrx is incompatible with the graphics stack now used in Stretch, which is why it's not available for Stretch, even if it's patched to build on a recent kernel, which has been done (not by Debian, but by others, including me) for those still using a Jessie base and newer kernels...such as MX Linux.

So it seems the choice is the open xorg radeon driver or the xorg amdgpu driver, if your hardware supports it. AntiX and MX Stretch-based 17 will have some code that detects if your card supports amdgpu and uses that driver automatically, that was just posted by a developer yesterday--it's already in antiX 17 testing ISOs. AMD also has a closed amdgpuPRO driver, but they don't officially support its use on Debian.

[qyron]

Crap. I had hopes to get my hardware fully running like before upgrading. I'm going through the info pages but I fear that I'll be left out for dry unless I go out and get a new(er) graphics card.

I have a RS780 L; firmware-amd-graphics supports the ME, PFP and UVD series. The other package you mention I'm still reading the material to understand if I can kick the thing into life with it but I have a sinking feeling the elder powers won't be able to get me out of sand this time.

edit
Strike out the last. My system is already running under the server-xorg-video-radeon. Guess I'm as good as it gets....