Asus HD 5750 Graphics Card on Ubuntu Lucid (10.04): Drivers & Blank Screen

I recently got a new Asus HD 5750 Formula 1GB video card (Model: EAH5750 FML/2DI/1GD5). The plan was to run this under Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) and to drive two HD Samsung monitors (SyncMaster P2450H 24" Monitor 1920x1080) from one card using the two digital outputs (1 HDMI and 1 DMI). The Asus card is based on the Radeon 5750 chipset and the heatsink looks like a formula 1 car. Sadly I thought that was quite cool.

I had already installed Ubuntu, stuck the card in and rebooted. Everything worked initially - the BIOS screen appeared and then the Ubuntu logo - very early in the boot up the screen went blank. The appeared to happen about when I would expect the video mode to change. I tried a Live-CD and got the same. What appears to be the problem is that the default drivers for the card that Ubuntu loads simply don't work. It seems to be a fairly common problem if you google it.

The solution is to get the "proper" drivers installed (I used the proprietary drivers). Of course if you have no working screen then that's tricky. I had the additional problem that holding down shift didn't show the grub2 menu at boot, which seems to be a known bug.

Getting the Grub2 Menu to Display

If you're lucky you should be able to get the grub2 menu to display at boot by holding down the shift key - I couldn't. Since my motherboard has a built graphics card I used the BIOS to enable this card (which works fine) and disabled the new card. This allowed me to boot up and log in. I guess I could have ssh'd in if I had set this up. Once logged in I:

• Edited /etc/default/grub
• Commented out the following line with a hash
  #GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
• Changed the time out to -1 to make it wait for a selection:
  GRUB_TIMEOUT=-1
• Applied the above changes with:
  sudo update-grub
• Rebooted the machine (and changed the BIOS back to use the new graphics card)

Installing Proprietary ATI Drivers to Prevent Blank Screen

The default Ubuntu proprietary drivers just don't work with this card. I found the Ubuntu X Team offer an excellent repository for a package of prop drivers rather than having to download them from Asus/ATI. I generally followed the instructions at the cchtml wiki.

• At boot-up get the grub menu to display (hold down shift or do the above)
• Select failsafeX from the grub menu and boot with this & log in
• Add the following repository from Ubunutu X Team:
  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
  sudo apt-get update
  
• Install the driver package (a bit different from the cchtml wiki):
  sudo apt-get install fglrx
  
• This last step was crucial for me:
  sudo aticonfig --initial -f
  
• Reboot the machine

At this point I could boot with the Asus video card without having to go via failsafeX. To configure the card use the ATI control centre in the under the preferences menu. A little playing around gave me a single huge desktop of 3840x1080 over the two monitors. And it looks rather sweet.