Archive for December 24th, 2008

Even if you have ubuntu, and a propietary driver for your computer was automatically installed for you, its usually a good idea to install one yourself. The reason being that the drivers automatically dowloaded by ubuntu’s “hardware drivers” feature are oftentimes close, but not the perfect match for your video card. For example, i used to have to disable mip-maps on compiz with the driver that was automatically downloaded, otherwise i would see a white cube or window everytime i used compiz. To download the ATI driver you need to know what video card you have, once you know, head to the download site:

Drivers & Software

Be sure to choose your processor architecture. After you download the file it will have this at the end.

ati-driver-installer-8-12-x86.x86_64.run

I had never heard of a “.run” file, and after some research i learned that it was a shell script. So to run this program i would execute the following command as root in the terminal

sh ‘/home/francisco/Desktop/ati-driver-installer-8-12-x86.x86_64.run’

replace the part in quotes with the link to your download location

After you execute the command you should see this window

Choose to install the driver and press Continue. Then accept the license agreement.
\

Then choose automatic installation

Press Continue

Then Continue again

The driver installs, then follow the directions on the page

reboot

if after reboot the driver fails to install, run this from the terminal as root

aticonfig –initial -f

reboot

All right, there are several different ways to find and download a distro, if you can’t figure out how to download a file, then you probably are not going to be a good match with linux. However there is a common error that many new users do that can be avoided so you can save yourself from having to burn one or two corrupt cds.

After you have saved the cd to a file in your computer, you will need to find a cd burning program, if you are running a Windows, i recommend using ImgBurn

Install it, and follow the directions
Here’s the important part, burn it at the lowest or second to lowest setting. The higher the burn speed the higher the chance for error, and the wrong file being corrupt can cause the installation to fail or not work correctly.

If you choose to burn at a high speed, your installation may work but some files may become corrupt, so make sure you turn down the heat.