Well I fixed this once but then after messing about adding a Nvidia external card to my system I broke it and had to go through the painful experience of finding the fix again.
So better write this down.
The Problem.
It seems that ATI Radeon Graphics Cards and built in motherboard Graphics using these chips (such as my ASRock 960GM Motherboard) are a bit problematic when installing the propriety drivers and the open source drivers are a bit crap (up to yet).
It has problems using the Cinnamon desktop and manifests itself by only using software rendering which has meant using 45% of the processors power and the fan runs hot and crazy sometimes. I also noticed no hardware 3D.
The reason.
After some reading and a lot of red herrings from various forums it comes down to ATI no longer supporting the Linux drivers for these cards, series Radeon HD 2*** through to Radeon HD4***. Mine is an onboard Radeon HD3000.
It seems as the x-org server which runs the desktop behind the scenes has been updated this has created incompatibilities with the driver.
The newer versions of the ATI Catalyst propriety installation program for Linux will not work for the older cards / chips and are not supported anymore.
The Solution.
The only way to fix this is to downgrade your x-org server to an older version and then install the legacy (old) driver that last worked fully.
Luckily Tomasz Makarewicz has made a fix for this and a web search for his site shows you how. https://launchpad.net/~makson96/+archive/fglrx
Now I followed his instructions but still had problems with Cinnemon not running. It crashed on start up.
I wasn't the only one and found an interesting fix on the Linux Mint forums. I can't remember the link though and this guy needs some credit too. I did write down his process to do after the makson96 fix was done and this has fixed everything. Even the Catalyst adjustment program works on the menu.
This is it.
Reboot ...... Cinnemon crashes.....
Open terminal
sudo apt-get remove --purge xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx*
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
He then says delete xorg.conf which is in the ./etc/ folder but I don't think this is necessary.
Anyway then reboot. I did it straight from the terminal with
sudo reboot
Voila !!! My sytem was working with the ATI drivers.
Next Job getting duel monitors working. that should be fun.
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