Topic: Ubuntu 12.04 / AMD driver woes (Read 842 times)

Hello,

I'm a n00b with mining and have been absolutely stumped with my substantial attempts to get a miner working reliably.  I've tried every magic recipe there is and have even read faqs, readmes, forums, and the fm, and they all have failed for one reason or another. Although I have in fact been able to get cgminer working with both a 5450 and a 6850 (at different times) and connected to a pool, in the past, my installation has been very fragile and prone to mysterious malfunctions.  Since the random-recipe approach is not working, it's time to understand this on a deeper level.  So I'd like to start a conversation about how to do this.  I'd also like to restrict this thread to Ubuntu and AMD since this seems to be very common and it's what I have readily available.  That said...

According to my understanding, the first step in doing any mining is to install the drivers for the video cards.  For this we have two choices:

1. An open-source "radeon" driver, which is what Ubuntu installs by default.

2. A closed-source proprietary driver, aka "Catalyst", which is available from developer.amd.com.

I'd like to hear some thoughts on:

A. The general tradeoffs of using the open-source drivers vs. the proprietary Catalyst drivers.

B. Specific combinations of Ubuntu and driver that you all have successfully working.  Also, the same that are known to be buggy.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.