How do I install elementary with AMD graphics card when the USB install program does not load the drivers for my card

Question

I have an old desktop PC with an AMD mobo and CPU and towards the end of last year upgraded my ancient NVIDIA graphics card to a used but newer and more powerful AMD Radeon. Ever since I have had no end of headaches attempting to install a variety of Linux OS. The ones that do install have an option to go with no basic graphics and following installation, I then have to edit the Grub menu in some way. E.g use "nomodeset" or "amdgpu.dc=0" in order to boot and use the system. Unfortunately, this distro does not give me the low graphics option on installation. Noone on any forum in any of the distros can yet explain or adequately help me with this issue. The kernel is meant to contain the drivers for the card to work but nope this simply is not the case for me.

My card is a bog-standard AMD Radeon R9 380X from about 2015. Works perfectly fine with Windows 10 but I have yet to find a Linux distro that plays nice with it. Sorry, I can't give all the system specs right now as I am on my laptop and the problem is on a separate machine. But very basically I have an AMD Phenom II X4 and 16 gig RAM with ssd hdd.

By the way, I can get it installed by swapping out my AMD card for the old NVIDIA one but overall that doesn't really solve my problem. My only other recourse if all else fails may be to sell this card and buy a replacement NVIDIA one - I thought that was a bit drastic just to install a distro.

Any and all suggestions are gratefully received.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Okay so I managed to install the distro on an external SSD plugged into my Windows 10 laptop and then popped that drive into my PC. It still refuses to boot normally however and I have to go via the recovery option. Here is my system from within Elementary:

System: Host: SwiftSF31452G73582ad5 Kernel: 5.13.0-28-generic x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: Pantheon Distro: elementary OS 6.1 Jólnir Machine: Type: Desktop Mobo: ASUSTeK model: M4A89GTD-PRO/USB3 v: Rev 1.xx serial: <superuser/root required> BIOS: American Megatrends v: 3029 date: 07/05/2012 CPU: Quad Core: AMD Phenom II X4 B50 type: MCP speed: 1900 MHz min/max: 800/2400 MHz Graphics: Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] RS880 [Radeon HD 4290] driver: N/A Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Tonga XT / Amethyst XT [Radeon R9 380X / R9 M295X] driver: N/A Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.13 driver: ati,vesa unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,radeon resolution: 1440x900~N/A OpenGL: renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 12.0.0 128 bits) v: 4.5 Mesa 21.2.6 Network: Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet driver: r8169 Drives: Local Storage: total: 959.48 GiB used: 8.85 GiB (0.9%) Info: Processes: 262 Uptime: 3m Memory: 7.45 GiB used: 1.04 GiB (14.0%) Shell: bash inxi: 3.0.38

As can be seen no graphics drivers are loaded. Any solutions to this please?