What is the difference between fglrx* and fglrx?

Question

Is there a difference between fglrx* and fglrx?

What is the meaning of * if added??

I did use the following steps because I was not sure whether I've had a graphic driver or not. So I wanted to activate a driver...

ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics install fails, how can I resolve the problem?

Then many problems occured - like changes of the quality of the desktop environment - and I wanted to know if they happened because of the difference of *?

I am a new Ubuntu 12.04 user. Was it wrong to have purged fglrx*? I also get this error each time I boot Ubuntu since then:

The disk drive for /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 is not ready yet or not present

I would be really glad if someone could help me out!

Answer 1

The * is a "wildcard" character, it basically means "any number of characters".

For example, let's say you have three packages/programs installed called fglrx and fgrlx-updates, and fglrx-amdcccle. If you only want to remove fglrx, you will use apt-get remove fglrx. If you want to remove all three of them, you'll have to do apt-get remove fglrx fglrx-updates fglrx-amdcccle. However, an easier way would be to do apt-get remove fglrx*, which means remove all packages that start with fglrx.

In the steps of the link you provided, the person mentioned sudo apt-get --purge remove fglrx*. This is to ensure that you remove all packages related to fglrx, so you can start all over and install only the needed packages. So to answer your question, yes, that command removed your ATI graphics drivers, and made Ubuntu use the open source drivers, that's why the quality of the desktop environment changed.

I suggest you now run the command sudo apt-get --purge remove fglrx*, then sudo apt-get autoremove, then restart, then use the Additional Drivers to install, then reboot.