Installing AMD Radeon drivers in Linux: Example from HP 4331s with Ubuntu/Netrunner

Last week, I tested Netrunner on HP 4431s Pro-book laptop (2.3 Ghz 2nd Gen. Ci3, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB Hard drive, Windows 7, 1 GB AMD Radeon HD 7470M graphic processor). This laptop belonged to my friend and he came to me to resolve a couple of issues:

• Virus/Malware problem and slowing down of Windows 7 - the antivirus software installed could not remove, neither it could be deleted manually.
• Heating issue: possibly proprietary drivers were not installed in Win7 and hence, the excessive heat.

So, I went ahead with installing Netrunner 13.06 on the machine.

From Netrunner 13.06 http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in

Installing Radeon Drivers
I have another laptop with Nvidia Geforce 630M graphics and I am quite familiar with installing bumblebee for Nvidia. Radeon was a new thing for me. However, Ubuntu and KDE forums came as a lot of help in this. The Radeon driver was required to tackle the heating issue (without the drivers, the graphic processor would always remain on and cause excessive heat). 

So, I proceeded to download the fglrx drivers (along with installing Linux generic headers). You can get the details of the process from the Ubuntu Forum link. I installed through the terminal and the commands are given below:

$sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic

$sudo apt-get install fglrx fglrx-amdcccle

$sudo aticonfig --adapter=all --initial 

Once installed, from Settings -> Driver Manager, I selected fglrx option, instead of the default xserver-xorg-video-ati option. And that did the trick! Fan speed became normal and the laptop cooled down significantly. Earlier, I could have fried an egg on it!

From Netrunner 13.06 http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in

Incompatibility of Linux kernel 3.8.0 with Radeon drivers
On Asus K54C, the desktop effects worked with Intel graphics. On HP 4331s, once I installed the Linux Radeon drivers, I was not able to choose Opengl as compositing manager in the Advanced tab, Kwin inevitably crashed every time I selected it. On searching in net, I found it is because of incompatibility of Radeon drivers with kernel 3.8.0 and the best solution is to downgrade it to 3.7.10 till a fix is available.

From Netrunner 13.06 http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in

I guess it will get resolved with the new update. Otherwise, with the installation of Radeon drivers, excessive heating issue was resolved and I could play games with Steam, in Linux.