Hi, all.

I've received my first Linux machine. I'm trying to hook it up to my older Plasma TV (no VGA hookup) and bought the Radeon HD 5450 Graphics card. At first, it would display but wasn't activated. I've spent a couple weeks scouring blogs to finally do (at the terminal line) sudo ati (something) --initiate, which turned it on. Now, i get picture and sound with a functional mouse, but I can't get to the desktop. I really want this to work. The box will only be for watching movies. A friend suggested that I put in the Ubuntu bootup with the hardware installed and try to reinstall, but now I can't find the boot-up disk and I when I redownload it from ubuntu.com, it doesn't work. So, any thoughts as to what I can do?

Oh, one more thing, i have downloaded the fglrx (or whatever it is, again, i'm new to linux) from the ATI website.

D

If you are using Ubuntu the display should work out of the box with the open source radeon drivers. You can install the proprietary drivers easily using the "Additional Drivers" application (aka jockey). Using the driver from the AMD site will also work, but that has to be re-installed every time you machine receives kernel/X updates, so using jockey is normally the way to go, especially for someone new to Linux.

Since you are not giving us any hint on what doesn't work, which error-messages you get, and so on, this is all I can say to help you.

Hi, and thank you so much for responding. What it does is it displays on the TV. It does its boot-up sequence. It plays the boot-up music. Then, at the purple screen where the mouse pointer appears, it just gets hung up at that point. It does nothing else. That's it.