After a couple of weeks of pain I finally managed to get my new 7970 going on linux. It was essentially a nightmare.
This guide is pretty good and it is the one I followed with the exception of driver installation, (the last driver install anyway).
http://blog.truepps.com/complete-guide-to-mine-scrypt-on-xubuntu-13-10/
Ultimately I just used the "gui method" from here to actually install the driver.
http://xpressrazor.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/fix-catalyst-driver-in-ubuntu-13-04/
The above one has really good info on everything including troubleshooting and removing old drivers.
I started out with ubuntu 12.1 then 13.10 before finally ending up with xubuntu 13.10.
For whatever reason when installing the wrong driver or otherwise messing up on ubuntu I would lose my desktop however even after installing the wrong driver again on xubuntu I was able to log in. (If you break your desktop hit ctrl-alt-f2 and you can at least get a console but good luck fixing it after that. )
To make a long story short the problem the whole time was that the current release of catalyst doesn't support the x server that is in ubuntu. Most of the guides on the net just say "get the latest driver" or whatever which is not always correct.
update: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI3NzU the latest release supports up to xorg1.13 so beta may not be needed.
After a lot of suffering I was able to figure out that you have to use the beta catalyst versions to get support for the latest x-orgs.
This should flash on the boot screen for everyone running linux because I bet nearly everyone breaks their install loading video drivers.
Read the release notes on the driver page and it will say what versions of what it supports. I'm sure beta drivers are use at your own risk so if something happens call amd not me
..I just want to mention that I managed to get xubuntu 13.10 running cgminer on a 7970 using amd-catalyst-13.11-betav9.95-linux-x86.x86_64
so that someone else doesn't go through the two weeks of hell that I went through. I am not advising anyone to do this I'm just saying what worked for me. It might be better to get an old distro with a known good driver to be safe but I'm just glad to be up at the moment.
Remember to get either 32 or 64 bit version of the driver based on which os you are running.
If this helps anyone please feel free to donate.
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At some point before finally installing the beta drivers I did install linux generic headers as discussed here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2074994 but I think this is more of a troubleshooting step.
I did not try to install the 32 bit libraries as discussed there and on xpressrazor.