Dead horse beat. Legacy AMD on 14.04
 

If I sudo-apt-upgrade it destroys apt-get and apt-update, nothing works. So I use stock iso image and gnome 3 shell.

I understand it's something about xorg support being dropped after a certain version.

I run the open source and it works very well for most things. The Dark Mod and anything openGL is good performance.

Some things in wine though, are very slow. 4-10 fps slow. I think my clock speeds may be stuck in 2D mode? I've searched this and I don't know how to confirm if it is or not while a wine program is running. Any tool that could force it with an option won't run with my driver.

Installing any catalyst also breaks the system with no monitor found. If I have no option beyond new hardware, how can I make sure the card I have is running full potential? (the fan sure is, going to wire in a hardware control as a solution. Just don't forget to crank it up when needed :) )

AMD B65 unlocked to quad
HD4850
4G ddr3

TY For forums ;)

A HD4850 should work on the OSS kernel stuff. No expert on Ubuntu versions, but I ran a HD4650 for years and was happy as one could be with it. You always need matching versions of kernel, Mesa, Xorg-server, libdrm, & libpixman as well as the radeon drivers. What versions are installed?

Hello and welcome to LQ.

Might look at this for some info. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

A more lightweight window manager could help maybe.

I think you should be able to run LTS 16 but for sure you should be able to update. A lot of security issues from stock iso till now.

There might be some way to find out the frames per second. Not sure if I know of a way to test video like windows might.

I try lshw -c video, just says Driver=Radeon. I guess whatever the latest open source is, is "working." Fglrx is what screws me any version, or any way I try to install on 14.04.

I wouldn't be really concerned if sudo apt-get upgrade didn't kill my machine. What's the deal here? I feel like it's xorg breaking/bugging when it happens. Like I said, no monitor found or some other xorg greek to me still error, depending what driver I try.

As you say security issues, I do run NoScript, and sit behind a sonicwall TZ.

Actually I think I have a cpu bottleneck after all of it. Going to upgrade board/proc/mem first and see what happens in wine. I disabled cool and quiet and it did actually help fps.

Fun fact: I did get fglrx working recently. Once. With Mint 13 and allot of commands later. However, something else I forget what.., stopped me from doing what I wanted to do. I think wine wanting something mint 13 couldn't run. Days of researching similar machines/downloading distros, waiting on bars, all flushed for naught. I wasn't to thrilled.

"sudo apt-get upgrade didn't kill my machine," (of course we could consider update first)

It shouldn't. Try the package manager and find out what is going wrong.

I think I know. It's upgrading my kernel beyond 3 including the new xorg's that won't work with mein hardware. I remember researching it a while back.