“AMD Unsupported Hardware” watermark in Linux Mint

Question

I just setup my new computer that has onboard video and Installed Linux Mint. I installed the "ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver" from Hardware Drivers and now I have a watermark on the bottom left of my screen that says "AMD Unsupported Hardware".

Why is this there? Is there anyway to get rid of this?

Onboard video specs: ATI Radeon HD 4200 GPU SidePort Memory - onboard 128MB DDR3 1333 memory

@Jared Harley: I've been searching around and havn't found a fix for this. /etc/ati/control exists so that shouldn't be a problem.

Answer 1

Got the answer!

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

Found my hardware under Linux x86_64 > Integrated/Motherboard > Radeon HD 4200

"Linux x86" means 32 bit "Linux x86_64 means 64 bit

Download the driver somewhere (lets put it in '~/stuff') Open up the terminal and type:

user@user-desktop:~/stuff $ cd ~/stuff
user@user-desktop:~/stuff $ chmod +x NAMEOFTHEFILEHERE.run
user@user-desktop:~/stuff $ ./NAMEOFTHEFILEHERE.run

And the driver will be installed.

Answer 2

According to a post at Phoronix:

With the fglrx 8.39.4 driver (or newer), there's a chance you may run into a watermark (similar to the AMD testing watermark) saying that your hardware is unsupported when in fact it is supported. If you run into this unsupported hardware watermark, it's likely that /etc/ati/control is missing. If that's the case for you, try reinstalling the driver or manually copying the control file. The driver contents can be extracted using the --extract argument and the control file is located in common/etc/ati/. If you experience this problem, create a thread in the Phoronix Forums with what distribution you are using and how you had installed the driver initially (and whether adding the control file had removed the watermark).

Other people also had luck downgrading their video driver to one version lower.

Answer 3

I used the following command to unpack the drivers

./ati-driver-installer-10-1-x86.x86_64.run --extract

I then copied the new file into the old place

cp /etc/ati/control /etc/ati/control-old
cp common/etc/ati/control /etc/ati/control

It got rid of the watermark for me and the old proprietary driver appears to still work with the new control file.

Answer 4

Try using the open-source "ati" driver instead of fglrx. The performance will be abysmal but you won't have the watermark (no one is going to code such an anti-feature in a FLOSS driver).