I just installed Ubuntu 11.04 32-bit on my old P4-Ati Radeon rig. Boots well, gets into desktop, however left bar and top bar are garbled. Main desktop area and windows in that area are mostly fine, however some windows such as settings window have areas that disappear when mouse-over occurs. Right click menus also are garbled.
My guess is that my AGP ATI Radeon 3-series driver has faulty implementation. What can I do?
It's known issue with ATI/AMD video cards on Ubuntu 11.04. This source was very helpful for me. Just need to read attentively and follow an instructions how to install proprietary driver aka Catalyst/fglrx .
Did you install these essential dependencies,
sudo apt-get install build-essential cdbs fakeroot dh-make debhelper debconf libstdc++6 dkms libqtgui4 wget execstack libelfg0 dh-modaliases
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
The built-in driver for Radeon cards have improved rapidly in the last releases. In 11.04, I too had a few problems with it when using Unity. This should be temporarily solved by choosing Ubuntu Classic as a session when you login.
Ubuntu 11.10 will be released in less than one week. It should have fixed these things, so I think the best choice is to use Ubuntu Classic until then and then upgrade to the new Ubuntu. I would actually not recommend installing the proprietary drivers. At least on HD 5850, the open drivers are much better on 11.10. They're better for most things in 11.04 as well.
