amdgpu-pro drivers on Ubuntu 18.10

michele

Warning: Some user are reporting problems with this drivers. If you have any trouble you should be able to recover using the  amdgpu-pro-uninstall shell command. Please do this only if you have some experience on how fix problem if the occur.

Long story short: I have a new shiny desktop pc, with a hopefully powerfull AMD Radeon RX580, so why not use it for opencl, to ML experiment and of course improve my editing speed in Darktable.

So I went straight to the AMD site, looking for the wonderfully marketed OSS drivers. Found, downloaded and so let’s set it up! [for reference: https://www.amd.com/en/support/graphics/radeon-500-series/radeon-rx-500-series/radeon-rx-580 ]

 

First we install mesa libs:

 sudo apt install mesa-utils

Now it should be easy as:

tar -xf amdgpu-pro-*.tar.xz
cd amdgpu-*/
/amdgpu-pro-install -y

But, of course, it’s not.

amdgpu-pro ERROR: This package can only be installed on Ubuntu 18.04.

So, I googled and found nothing helpfull. But this evening i feel brave, so let’s force it a little bit. How can we fool the installer? strace come to the rescue.

Just edit the file /etc/os-release and edit this line:

VERSION_ID="18.10"

To be like:

VERSION_ID="18.04"

Save, relaunch the scripts, get everything installed,  cross your finder, enjoy.

Change back the file, and reboot. Works for me, hopefully for you too.