Dell IN2010N monitor with Ubuntu 9.10

Wow, this took me a couple of hours to figure out, so I thought I better share this with the world. I have a Dell IN2010N 1600x900 widescreen monitor and my desktop's running Ubuntu 9.10 with an ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card. Originally I could not get the correct screen resolution as Ubuntu wouldn't even recognize my monitor. Trying to use Ubuntu's automatic restricted hardware drivers system didn't get me any further either. Finally, after trying various hacks including using xrandr and trying to force a custom xorg.conf file, I found the answer.
First off I downloaded a graphics driver via this AMD site. In my case I specified the OS as Linux x86_64, the product family as Radeon and the product as ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series. I figured it's best to go with the 5xxx series than the 4800 one, because my correct model (i.e. HD 5450) wasn't listed. After downloading the automatic installation script I first made it executable by typing

chmod +x ati-driver-installer-10-1-x86.x86_64.run

Note: Obviously you need to cd into the directory where you downloaded the file first.

After that I ran it by typing

sudo sh ./ati-driver-installer-10-1-x86.x86_64.run

and decided to use the "Automatic" installation option. Once everything completed successfully I rebooted my machine. Straight away the monitor seemed to be working with the correct resolution settings. A quick glance in the ATI Catalyst Control Center (found via System->Preferences->ATI Catalyst Control Center) confirmed all was fine. The make and model of my monitor (including its recommended screen resolution) had been correctly recognized. My excitment was somewhat damped though by a mysterious AMD watermark in the bottom right hand corner of the monitor. It seemd to suggest that somehow my monitor was unsupported hardware. "How is it!??" I shouted at my computer, "It clearly isn't, since everything's working fine and my monitor is now recognized!!". However no matter how much I tried to argue with my machine, the watermark remained. In the end I decided to do some more googling, which is when I came across this life-saving post. I was already so fed up that I didn't really care to understand what exactly the little piece of code in that post did, and I decided to give it a shot regardless. I created a file

test.sh

and pasted the following content in it.

#!/bin/sh
DRIVER=/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so
for x in $(objdump -d $DRIVERawk '/call/&&/EnableLogo/{print "\\x"$2"\\x"$3"\\x"$4"\\x"$5"\\x"$6}'); do
sed -i "s/$x/\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90/g" $DRIVER
done

Next I made the file executable by running chmod

chmod +x test.sh

and executed it as super user

sudo sh ./test.sh

Since nothing exiting seemed to happen after the script had completed I decided to reboot. To my relief the damn watermark was gone and I could get on with more pleasurable things in life such as writing this blog.

Useful resources related to this post:

AMD Graphics Drivers & Software download page

Ubuntu X/Config/Resolution resource page

Lifesaving hack to suppress the AMD watermark