ATI Catalyst 9.8 Released, How To Upgrade Your ATI Drivers in Linux

[Linux] With ATI Catalyst 9.8, ATI finally has support for newer kernels. The Linux 2.6.29 kernel was released in March, but it has taken until today for AMD to release any support for this kernel. However, at the same time, they have also released support for the Linux 2.6.30 kernel, which arrived back in June. The new Linux 2.6.31 kernel will be released soon but unfortunately, ATI Catalyst 9.8 will not support it.

Catalyst 9.8 also comes with some fixes for: Ogre engine, ACPI-based display switching on laptops with RandR 1.2 enabled, support for several new OpenGL extensions, and various other fixes.

The official release notes are not yet available, but should be out soon, at THIS link. AMD's Catalyst 9.8 ATI driver for Linux can be downloaded from HERE.

How to install the latest AMD Catalyst 9.8 for ATI graphic cards in Linux

Once you download the installer, you can create the necessary packages for your distribution with the following command (in a terminal):

./ati-driver-installer-9-8-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg distro/version

Replace "distro" with your distribution name and "version" with your distribution version.

For example, to install the latest Catalyst 9.8 in Ubuntu Jaunty, the command would be:

./ati-driver-installer-9-8-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/jaunty

If you want to return to the "free" ATI driver:

chmod +x /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh
sudo sh /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh

Another fix for ATI graphic card drivers is the same patch which comes with these Ubuntu repositories (the post is about Intel but also works for ATI - this PPA is for stable upstream releases of X.org components).