I have finally bought a new graphics card to my computer, a Asus Radeon HD 6870 DirectCU. It was a bit longer than my old card, a PowerColor 4870, so it was tough to fit in the computer chassis. But I made it at last.
The reason why I purchased a new card, was because my old one was half broken and wasn’t able to run with the default clock speeds without getting artifacts everywhere on my monitors.
When I first started Linux Mint with my new card plugged in, I was welcomed by a black screen, which wasn’t very fun. So I booted up Linux Mint in Recovery Mode and tried to install working graphics driver. The driver I had from earlier was ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver from the Additional Drivers window in Linux Mint (and Ubuntu). This graphics driver didn’t work after a clean install of Linux Mint either.
I also found these two guides: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI and http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Maverick_Installation_Guide, which describes how to install ATI driver. But the terminal command aticonfig never worked for me, so I didn’t manage to complete the installation.
However, if you simply download the proper driver from AMD’s website, and then run it like a normal program, it works just as it should. So I can’t really see the reason why you would build the graphics driver into packages and install them and so on in 20+ steps. Maybe it’s easier to uninstall the driver in the future. But how often do you change video card or update your graphics driver on Linux?
Anyway, it works great now and I’m happy.