Oct 3, 2012

Ubuntu 12.04 notes.

Ubuntu 12.04 has been released for a while. I recently installed this version and almost everything works great except the video and wireless driver. I have google for a very long time and viewed many threads to solve these two problems. Therefore, this post is just to remind me how I solved this problem.

Video Drivers:

My notebook's graphic card is ati radeon hd 4300. If you want to check what graphic card your computer is using just type:

lspci -vnn | grep VGA

and it will show you the information that you need.
Actually, there are many ways to install the graphic drivers. The following is just how I set my video drivers.
First make sure you haven't installed an old fglrx drivers. If you do, simply type:

sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx* fglrx_* fglrx-amdcccle* fglrx-dev*

this command will remove the fglrx driver that your system is currently using.
After remove the old drivers, download the binary file from the amd support web site:
In my case, the binary file I need to download is as follow. http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/previous/12/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx?os=Linux%20x86&rev=12.4
After download the binary file type:

chmod +x amd-driver-installer-12-4-x86.x86_64.run
./amd-driver-installer-12-4-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/precise
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

That's it. Reboot your system and the fglrx should installed properly.
More detailed, check the following two reference websites.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI
http://askubuntu.com/questions/124292/what-is-the-correct-way-to-install-ati-catalyst-video-drivers

Wireless Drivers:

My notebook's wireless NIC is Broadcom BCM 4312. Again, if you want to know what chipset your device is using type:

lspci -vnn | grep Network

And it will print out the information you need. After knowing the chipset, it's time to find out what kind of driver/module that I need. Actually, installing the new wireless driver is very simple in ubuntu 12.04. Just type sudo apt-get install backport-module-cw-$kernel_version the kernel_version is your kernel version which can use uname command to verify it. After this instruction, it will install almost all the wireless module(atheros or broadcom chipset) from newer kernel version. Hope this post can help others. :)

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