I'm not yet a mature Linux user, but I have been playing with different flavors of Linux as well as using Linux as my main OS for some time now. Since I've a Skylake ThinkPad with no dedicated graphics, the issue of installing discrete graphics on a graphics-hybrid laptop has never come across until now.
I've gotten a good friend of mine interested in Linux a little while back, seeing him discover the seemingly endless possibilities of Linux has been charming. I installed Mint 18 on his Dell laptop, thinking It a good starting point. I wasn't wrong, but I had neglected a small detail: the Dell Vostro 3550 laptop he aims to use as his daily Linux driver has a hybrid graphics setup of Intel HD 3000 and AMD's 6th generation mobile graphics. The later has proven to be a real pain in the ass to configure since we're not willing to simply neglect the discrete graphics integrated into this laptop.
The machine (Dell Vostro 3550) as he's currently rocking it has an i3-2330M CPU w/ 3MB of L3 cache, clocked @ 2.20GHz, 6 GB of DDR3 1333MHz RAM and a Samsung 840 EVO 120GB SSD with - and this the the part that's problematic - Radeon HD 6630M 1GB discrete graphics card, so, all-in-all, still a worthy little machine.
Hunting down and installing the correct graphics drivers for this discrete GPU is quite simiple in Windows, not so much in Linux Ubuntu or Mint, it seems. I would like very much for my buddy to fully adopt some flavour of Linux but he says he's simply not willing to disregard the HD 6630M and would rather return to Win7 than continue using his this laptop with the iGPU only and I can't blame him for that.
I've searched far and wide and come upon a fair few guides detailing the installation of AMD's Catalyst software in Ubuntu as well as some older versions of Mint but have so far had no success actually installing said software and drivers. The laptop sports the latest BIOS but It doesn't offer a feature to disable the iGPU, making Intel's HD3000 the only graphics workforce I can use by default. Using "lspci | grep VGA" in terminal does identify a secondary "VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Whistler [Radeon HD 6630M/6650M/6750M/7670M/76790M] (rev ff)", but all attempts at installing and enabling the discrete graphics card as the main graphics output have been in vain.
I would really like to see my friend not switch back to the dark side so I beg you to to give me directions and advice on how to enable and manage the discrete graphics card in question under Linux.
Linux comes with a decent free driver for AMD as standard, you might want to use it. It installs automatically with linux as far as I know.
Question: Why would he want to use the comparatively power-hungry discrete graphics for all things and not only the GPU-intensive things?
If he really needs the power you might want to try prime with the free drivers. I can't help you any further there because I have a Laptop with a auxiliary Nvidia card and I do not use it under linux, the iGPU in my i5-2550M is beefy enough for youtube and things.
Unfortunately you have old hardware and AMD has completely renewed their driver stack which means it leaves many of the older hardware in a bit on a bad place. This model is not supported currently by the new AMD propitiatory stack.
Meaning that you are searching for no reason and there is nothing to install. The open driver that is already present in the kernel is your only option.
You just need to de-activate the iGPU. If the BIOS does not have the option you need to blacklist the intel GPU from the OS.
So on the next reboot the OS will only see the AMD card and load the appropriate driver.
Honestly the Intel HD graphics are pretty badass. My wife's gaming machine is an i3, and for a while all she had was the HD graphics. Played Borderlands 2 at 1080p. The pretties weren't cranked, but they weren't at minimum either.
The open source Radeon driver has also come a long ways. If you have the option of disabling either of the graphics in the BIOS, it might be worth your while to test their performance individually.
But sadly, AMDs proprietary drivers are in a state of upheval. Both in Linux and in Windows. I've got a couple of lower end AMD cards that are little more than paperweights at this point.
HAHA WHAT? A VOSTRO with a real spec sheet? I don't meant to be too much of a dumbass here but thats a bit astonishing to me as I thought they were all shitty 5 dollar office laptops!
Haha... Heh -cough- anyway what your after is PRIME. Theres an article on the archwiki for ir. Nothing to install its just build into the kernel.
It has been nerve-wreckingly difficult to fail to set up AMD Catalyst drivers on Ubuntu.
I started off using Mint 18 but soon found out that the drivers I was aiming to use, 15.302-x86_64, weren't compatible with said distro. I was having some luck following the instructions on Ubuntu forums (https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1930450), but didn't get far overall.
Finally, I after cycling through a few distros, I opted for Ubuntu 16 Mate, installed the prerequisite packages, ran the two lines of codes meant for x64 users and ran the driver installer in Terminator. The installation finished with success and a few .deb files appeared in my driver installation folder that I promptly installed into my system.
I ran 'aticonfig' and actually got results. Everything seemed to be running the way it should be, I got the driver to identify the GPU with console commands and felt like I had finally, finally, succeeded in putting AMD's proprietary Catalyst suite on my Dell Vostro.
Everything seemed fine. The graphical settings were nowhere to be found but I was completely happy, even if I had to set up everything via 'aticonfig'.
Well, a reboot later, the shit has hit the fan and I'm back at square one (it seems), typing in 'aticonfig' yields: "No supported adapters detected", as If nothing had happened.
fglrx is deprecated, why would you still want to use it, it fucks up the security and stability of your entire system. You'll probably get more than enough performance from amdgpu, which is a kms driver, requires no setup, just works out of the box. Some people need OpenCL functionality that only amdgpu pro will provide, and even that is pretty safe to use because it doesn't require binary blobs in the kernel en doesn't require a MAC/RBAC exception, and is relegated to userland.
If you managed to have the iGPU disabled stay with the open drivers that are pre installed and if you need more performance just update to kernel 4.9 and add the latest mesa driver.
FGRLX is deprecated and you should not use it. The new proprietary driver does not support you GPU. Stay with the open drivers.
I think I understand a little better now. I won't be messing around with the proprietary drivers anymore, open source Radeon driver it is. (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver)
I can not disable the Intel iGPU in BIOS, there's no such option, and I don't know how to disable it any other way to make way for the dGPU.
I would really like for someone to simply explain to me the process of making the necessary adjustments in Ubuntu 16 Mate (or any other, more suitable distro), produce a step-by-step guide if you will. As much it is charmingly challenging, finding this stuff out largely on my own, I'm running out of time and patience and all I really want is to make it work.
To disable or sideline the Intel iGPU and make work the Radeon HD6630M dGPU which is reportedly more capable in all aspects but power consumption.
I would be most grateful for a step-by-step guide, please. Thank you.
The only thing i can think of is blacklist the iGPU from the OS and then reboot. It should then hopefully detect the AMD card and allow play with the open drivers to get the best you can. Mind you this would lead the laptop to only use the AMd card what ever you do and so it would reduce battery life.
Most likely the driver is i915. To blacklist stuff just create a new configuration file called 'blacklist.conf' in the /etc/modprobe.d/ directory, and add 'blacklist i915' to it.
You are (both) correct, there in indeed was a the "i915" kernel driver for the Intel iGPU and I blacklisted it as was recommended by adding a line "blacklist i915" to the blacklist.conf file via gedit.
Now the system asks if I want to use a low-resolution mode for the time being but freezes on the next window shown.
I can access the command line and I've managed to restart the GUI by typing "sudo service lightdm start", everything seems to be running off the Radeon. "radeontop" still can't identify the card (HD6630M) but 1080p Youtube seems to be running without a hitch.
I'll run a few Phoronix graphics tests to see what's going on, I think.
"sudo intel_gpu_top" still produces a read-out... now I'm confused. This is going on in Ubuntu 14 Unity.
Well, I got to thinking that the installed Radeon drivers might be making a mess and found out in Synaptic that the packages installed might indeed be wrong.
I threw out all packages in synaptic and installed "sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati". Now the machine simply freezes at the Ubuntu loading screen. Haha. No access to the command line it seems.
That was not the correct package. That was a bad move. The open driver has a lot of different packages. You probably removed all of them and reinstalled only a piece of it.
If you manage to get back to the same point as before please do inxi -acdf on terminal and see what version of kernel/MESA you are running, I suppose that if it is ubuntu LTS it should be 4.4 and MESA 11.
You have to upgrade to the newest ones and the issues will be solved. Basically upgrade to kernel 4.9 (use ukuu to automate things) and then upgrade to the latest stable MESA from this PPA:
Then you should be up-to-date and the system working ok. If t does not it seem that the specific hardware was abandoned by everyone. But i think you should be ok.
