On Tue, 17 May 2016 21:37:13 +0200, Emninger wrote:
> Hi. Indeed upgrading my system in some way i lost fglrx, and now, when
> i try to reinstall it from the repositories i'm getting that there is
> no fglrx driver. When i reactivate the Jessie repositories, the driver
> is there but when i try to install it, synaptic or apt-get lament that
> fglrx depends on xorg-video-abi- 19 (or 18 or 17 ...) but that they are
> not to be installed. Now, xorg-video-abi should be there with xorg-core
> which is installed.
>
> I'd like to solve this problem without having to do a downgrade (= a
> complete reinstall of Jessie) ... ? The overheating of this samsung
> (with the free ati driver) is a serious problem, making it not really
> useable ... May be there is another way to reduce overheating other
> than the non-free catalyst driver?

Hi Emninger,

that's exactly the problem with fglrx: Until there is a version
compatible with video-abi 20 or up, if you want to have it in
Ascii, you need xorg-video-abi < 20.

The virtual package xorg-video-abi 18 is provided by xserver-
xorg-core version 1.16 from Jessie (currently that's 2:1.16.4-1,
to be precise). So you'd have to downgrade that package, and in
consequence downgrade xorg (and all of it's companions) to
version 1:7.7+7.

I had to do just that, and even using aptitude, which allows to
navigate the package tree somewhat comfortably, it was a tedious
task. Plus, one has to make sure not to upgrade xorg to a "wrong"
version at a later time.

For the record: I never, ever do an apt-get upgrade - IMNSHO it
does not provide enough fine grained control over what exactly is
going to happen to your system, and it bit me very badly in the
past. Instead I always check with aptitude first what's going to
be upgraded, and only let it do it's job when I'm sufficiently
confident it's going to be alright. As a protective measure
against my own inaptitude (pun not intended), I pinned all the
xorg* packages to their respective Jessie versions, so I would
not accidentally upgrade to a version that would break fglrx.

I know this is all far from ideal, but the free ATI driver never
worked satisfactory on my desktop machine. Which is a real pity!

HTH, at least a bit.

Regards
Urban