The later “Catalyst” version of the ATI proprietary drivers, 8.2 (8.45.5), 8.1 (8.45.2), and 7.11 (8.43.3) do not have this problem, so this page is now obsolete.
The previous non-Catalyst version, 8.42.3, solved a long-standing problem with the ATI proprietary drivers for the first time: not being able to run Compiz or Beryl easily because of lack of support for compositing.
The driver packages, for all versions, allow you to build .deb packages for a variety of distributions, including Ubuntu/gutsy, like this:
$ sh ./ati-driver-installer-8.42.3-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/gutsy
Unfortunately, on x86_64 (aka amd64), building the 8.42.3 package failed with an error message about missing files in X11R6/lib:
# amd64 needs some library redirection
[snip]
dh_install -pxorg-driver-fglrx "usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri" "usr/lib32" cp: cannot stat `./usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri': No such file or directory dh_install: command returned error code 256 make: *** [binary] Error 1 Removing temporary directory: fglrx-install.E10832
The problem was that ATI's build script looked for some 32-bit libraries, common to both the 64bit and 32bit drivers, in the wrong place.
Solution
The solution is very easy, you just do the following:
- Extract the package
- Copy missing files to their correct location
- Build the package
Assuming that you've downloaded the package into the “current” directory, all you do is:
$ bash ati-driver-installer-8.42.3-x86.x86_64.run --extract ati-driver $ cd ati-driver $ cp -r arch/x86/usr/X11R6/lib arch/x86_64/usr/X11R6/ $ ./packages/Ubuntu/ati-packager.sh --buildpkg gutsy
The packages should build correctly.
After doing this, I was able to install the packages and follow this guide to get Compiz working on Ubuntu/gutsy on an Athlon64 with an ATI X1550.
