Linux Ubuntu 18.04 Driver Installation and Multi Monitor Issues

[jacobweaver800]

Hello! I'm sure many of you have heard that Microsoft supposedly isn't making another version of Windows and Windows 10 is there last OS, I decided to make a Youtube video on different operating systems and seeing whether or not it's worth the switch to it, I wanted to test the ever so popular Ubuntu Linux. After installing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS it loaded just fine and ran much faster than Windows 10 did on my PC, the issue is I have dual monitors, I have dual 768p monitors over VGA, in the video I will link you can see that my main monitor, or the one I want to be my main monitor, is not working correctly, on Windows 10 it works just fine.

I thought it may have been a driver issue, since the working monitor was on my I3 3220's integrated graphics. After finding the driver page for my AMD Radeon HD 5450, I found that there were multiple different downloads all posted for my GPU on the same date. Which do I download, and how do I install them.

After slamming my head on my table for about an hour, reading though the AMD support page for installing Ubuntu drivers I couldn't get it to work. I don't know what to do anymore, so I came to the forum for some help.

PC Specs
Intel Core I3 3220
AMD Radeon HD 5450
8gb's DDR3 1600mhz
250gb Hitachi 5400 RPM drive (Win 10)
250gb Seagate 5400 RPM drive (Ubuntu 18.04) (also unplugged when in Windows and vice versa)

 

[TJ Hooker]

There don't seem to be any drivers that officially support a card that old with such a new version of Ubuntu.

From the driver packages listed here: https://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/previous/detail?os=Ubuntu%20x86%2064&rev=15.9

You'd want the fist one ("AMD Catalyst™ 15.9 Proprietary Ubuntu 14.04 x86_64 Video Driver for Graphics Accelerators"). But that only lists support for Ubuntu 14.04, so it may not work. Alternatively, you can try: https://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Radeon-Software-for-Linux-18.20-Early-Preview-Release-Notes.aspx

Which supports Ubuntu 18.04, but does not list support for your card.

Those are for the proprietary, AMD-developed drivers. There are also the open source drivers that are included with linux. You can try just update the open source drivers by running "apt-get update" and then "apt-get upgrade" (this will update all software that is installed).

 

[jacobweaver800]

There don't seem to be any drivers that officially support a card that old with such a new version of Ubuntu.

From the driver packages listed here: https://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/previous/detail?os=Ubuntu%20x86%2064&rev=15.9

You'd want the fist one ("AMD Catalyst™ 15.9 Proprietary Ubuntu 14.04 x86_64 Video Driver for Graphics Accelerators"). But that only lists support for Ubuntu 14.04, so it may not work. Alternatively, you can try: https://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Radeon-Software-for-Linux-18.20-Early-Preview-Release-Notes.aspx

Which supports Ubuntu 18.04, but does not list support for your card.

Those are for the proprietary, AMD-developed drivers. There are also the open source drivers that are included with linux. You can try just update the open source drivers by running "apt-get update" and then "apt-get upgrade" (this will update all software that is installed).

Interesting, but I think I found a bug in Ubuntu 18.04 when running a monitor on a discrete GPU and having a monitor running on your CPU's iGPU the discrete card doesn't want to work in the system tray and only works on boot and lock screen, and even dual monitors at all or both on the iGPU, even at different resolutions one over HDMI and one on VGA.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Yeah, I did have a bit of trouble with Ubuntu and running a monitor off my iGPU while also having a dGPU installed with a monitor attached, even though I was trying to only run one display off the iGPU only. I ended up having to disable the dGPU entirely in Ubuntu (think the solution I found was to blacklist the device driver to prevent it from loading on bootup).