AMD/ATI video drivers in Squeeze
After installing Squeeze i386 on a Core 2 Duo system with 8 Gb of RAM I tried
to get the ATI proprietary driver (fglrx) from the repositories to work with the
Radeon HD 5450 included in the system. The procedure given on the Debian
wiki simply does not work. There are no visible error messages, but there is also
no working driver after the install. Even more annoying, the AMD driver installer
from their website doesn't work either.
After some experimentation I found one solution. The Debian installer in even
the "32-bit" version of Squeeze gives you the AMD64 kernel when it detects a
CPU with 64-bit capabilities, even though it's supposed to be a 32-bit system.
By installing the 32-bit "bigmem" kernel, I found it was then possible to get the
AMD installer to work, though the fglrx install from the repositories still doesn't
work. Does it work in the full AMD64 version of Squeeze? Or maybe in Wheezy?
The AMD installer seems to work fine when I have a 32-bit kernel in a 32-bit system,
but I have found message threads on this topic that claim a kernel upgrade will break
the driver since it won't automatically upgrade with the kernel. Is this true? Will I have
to uninstall the driver before upgrading the kernel, and then reinstall it?
What are the performance differences between the AMD64 kernel and the 32-bit
"bigmem" kernel? Is the "bigmem" kernel using something cumbersome like bank
switching to access more than 4 Gb of RAM?
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