Hi,

After a few days of horrific reformatting and forum searching I am yet to find ANYONE who has gotten a 4800 series graphics card to work with ANY linux distro.

there are plenty of threads asking for help, but none that actually resolve anything.

I have a hd 4870 512mb plugged into a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard.

my current track of activity has boiled down to


clean install.
full update
<insert forum produced jargon>
install driver
reboot
black screen
repeat.

I am currently attempting it get it working on Fedora 10 x86_64

I am willing to install ANY distro to get this working.

please help me.

" Howto for fglrx (Ati driver) and Compiz-fusion" does not work, tried it for fedora 10 and 9, both methods for 10

You need the ATI proprietary driver which you can download from ATI's site ati.amd.com. When you download it there are directions on how to install it. If it gives you problems, then there is an uninstall script that you can use instead of just re-installing Fedora.

I've got a 4850 that works most of the time (it is my test box and I screw with it regularly).

In your sequence of events, you never mentioning configuring the card. If you're using the ATI driver, you do have to run their config program before it will work.

as fedora 10 does not have an xorg.conf file by default it seems, aticonfig -- initial -f crashes.

can anyone give me a step-by-step installation of this card?

Try this in a console:

In theory that will create an xorg.conf.new file in whatever directory you run the command in, and if you copy it to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and use that as a starting point for the ATI driver. By the way, don't panic if X goes wonky while that command runs. It will go back to normal when it is done.

that line, after hitting enter, locked up my pc and again it refuses to boot into a gui.

edit *I waited like 25 mins for it to return to normal before I rebooted*

Hm. Sorry about that. I guess Fedora 10 is just backwards distro. I've got mine running smoothly on Slackware-current (although it did require a patch to run on a 2.6.29 kernel) if you were serious about switching distros. Given that Fedora is a gigantic beta test, I guess I'm not surprised normal stuff doesn't work.

i have the same proble, i use ubuntu and aparently amd is turning a little more open source, in this case the open driver works fine on a clean instalation, but after installing and configuring the card x goes hangs (this is after the reboot) i was trying to check the version of the ati driver used in the latest ubuntu but, i could not find out, so i downloaded the 9.4 from amd and gave me the same result, X hangs, I still need to try 9.3, 9.2, and so on because the 8.somethig worked nicely, or we could help the Xorg developers test our card since they have added support for it (we use RV770) so that would be better.

There are a couple of threads in the Slackware forum (and I've seen elsewhere as well) that the 9.x drivers are really not ready for use. If you need the ATI drivers, you should stick with 8.x.