Black Screen Installing AMD/ATI Catalyst Drivers on Ubuntu

When I tried installing the Catalyst driver for my Radeon 6870 on Ubuntu, I ran into a whole bunch of problems. Twice I ended up with a black screen at restart. First of all, the fglrx driver included in the Ubuntu repositories may be outdated, or may not support your chipset. Secondly, when searching for the proper driver on the AMD website, the result may not be right. When I searched for drivers, the result was Catalyst 9.3, when at the time of writing this post, the most recent version was actually 11.9.

To Install Catalyst on Ubuntu:

1. Download the most recent version here.

2. Then follow the instructions here, replacing the version number with the most current version. Basically, the commands are as follows, replacing the words in red italics with what applies to your system:

cd /where you downloaded the driver/

sudo ./ati-driver-installer-*-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/version name (e.g Natty)

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

sudo aticonfig --initial

Reboot your system and you're done.