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I've been researching on problems with ATI catalyst drivers and there is no fix as far as I can see. I have an ATI Radeon 7470m (HP Pavilion dm4). And I haven't managed to have a properly working distro.

Is there any Linux distro that behaves well with this card and allows me to have GNOME3 without burning my laptop? If there is not a solution yet this question should help new users to get a quick update :)

Sergio Basurco
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  • Have you tried [**Fedora**](https://fedoraproject.org/)? (I'm not sure whether it has the drivers you need, I'm just asking/giving a hint. Also, for battery life, check out [TLP](http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-management.html).) – jcora Jul 23 '13 at 22:47
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    I have Debian on a desktop with a ATI X1300 and free drivers, and I'm happy with my hw acceleration. – Braiam Jul 23 '13 at 23:02

3 Answers3

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It looks like you should burn your laptop:

Your card is not supported by any driver, closed or open source.

You need to use what is working for you at the moment and wait for AMD to start supporting your card via their drivers.

After screwing around with a HP/dv6 I vowed never to get ATI ever again (and mine even works).

Community
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msw
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Mageia OS support ATI Radeon Series http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mageia

Jayesh Ahire
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The Ubuntu forums are currently down but there is a thread over there titled: AMD Radeon 7470M. In that thread someone asked the following question:

Question:   Has anybody successfully run linux on a laptop with a AMD 
            Radeon HD 7470M?
Background: HP Pavilion dv7 with and AMD Radeon HD 7470M graf card

To which someone answered that they were able to use Linux Mint successfully with that hardware.

Also in the Linux Mint forums there was this thread titled: Installing AMD Radeon Graphics Driver. In this thread a user reported that they were able to use the "beta" version of the Catalyst drivers and they worked fine.

I also have a Radeon video card from ATI (specifically, 7470M). I downloaded the lastest stable driver and the beta one. I ended up using the beta driver since it works seamlessly compared to the STABLE one who literally screwed up my display until I removed it and installed the beta driver.

If you go to the AMD website you can find the "beta" drivers available here, on a page titled: AMD Catalyst™ 13.6 LINUX Beta Driver. The article is dated 5/29/2013 and is article #: RN-LN-B13.6.

slm
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  • Thanks for the detailed answer. However I think msw is right and it's all a myth. I will try it out. But after researching a bit it's a matter of getting another laptop asap and never again buying AMD hardware. – Sergio Basurco Jul 26 '13 at 18:21