How to fix your AMD Graphics in Ubuntu 12.10 (updated)

The last week or so has been one of transition for AMD’s Catalyst driver, especially for those you have a quite old Radeon GPU. Alongside the launch of Ubuntu 12.10 – that comes with new xorg 1.13 and breaks the fglrx (aka Catalyst 12.9) – AMD has also drop the support for Radeon HD 4000, HD 3000 or HD 2000 graphics cards, forcing a broken upgrade up to Quantal 12.10. On the development side of things, this problem is not 100% percent related to Ubuntu 12.10, but it comes with the new version of xorg 1.13 that is included in Quantal, meaning that you need to downgrade xorg down to 1.12.  So for the time being there is no AMD Legacy support with X-Server 1.13, and you need to downgrade. Capping this off, the solution comes from inside the root of the problem, thus AMD’s driver team has launched a new driver for these outdated GPU models, called Catalyst Legacy.

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