Catalyst Driver for Jessie

[johna1954]

Hi and thanks in advance for any help you can give me.
I have Jessie 64bit running on an AMD motherboard and proccessors and have upgraded my graphics card to an AMD FirePro V5900. When installed graphics were fine and stable but now have a series of vertical lines on the screen. I am presuming that I do not have the correct driver for this card. Looking online the Catalyst drivers seem to work with this card (according to http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... 5900&num=3)
Jessie offers glx-alternative-fglrx Is this ok? has anyone had experience of this.
I see that AMD offers the latest driver for 32/64 bit linux. Is this the best way to go?
Apologies if these are basic questions but do not want to potentially mess up the system.
Thanks again
John

[stevepusser]

Usually the Debian packages offer a better experience than the version straight from the website. Please follow the guide in the wiki:

https://wiki.debian.org/ATIProprietary

The procedure for Jessie is about the same for Wheezy, though versions are more recent.

[johna1954]

Hi stevepusser,
Thank you for your reply. In the meantime I took the brute force approach and reinstalled Jessie with the new card installed. I do not think that this has installed the AMD/ATI Proprietary Driver mentioned but so far I do not have lots of lines across my screen.
I will try your recommendation tomorrow and hopefully will be smiling.
Thanks again your help is appreciated.
John

[stevepusser]

You are very probably using the free xorg Radeon driver. If you're happy with it's performance, go with that.

On my HP laptop, I have to use fglrx to get brightness control, hibernation, and suspend-to-RAM working correctly.

[johna1954]

The xorg Radeon driver caused a lot of lines on the screen and eventually became unusable.
With a clean install of Jessie followed instructions and eventually ended with a blank black screen. Tried going back to my original graphics card and still ended up with blank screen.
Removed the Xorg.conf file created in the install instructions but still no luck getting back to a usable OS
Reinstalled again with similar result. I am thinking either the card is faulty or not supported by the version of Catalyst I used (AMD Catalyst 12.6) Will maybe try the legacy 13.1 version and see what happens.
Any further thoughts appreciated.
Keen to get working as want the OpenGl and 30bit support for graphics work.

Thanks

John

[johna1954]

Thanks to all of you who looked and replied. Unfortunately despite all efforts I was unable to get this card running on Jessie. Even reinstalled Wheezy with the same problems. So have given up for now as too much time lost.

John

[stevepusser]

For the default xorg driver, you do need to install firmware-linux-nonfree. I just want to make sure you tried that.