Probably nothing, it will just work.

If not, he needs to go to administration->hardware drivers.

And then select 'activate' (it will automatically select the recomended driver).

WTH, this ain't AMD's fault, don't blame them! Soleron, take your hate elsewhere lol.

It's Linux that is garbage.

The drivers won't become invalid they just won't take advantage of newer feautures in Xorg. I can use legacy drivers from nVidia from very old sources in Ubuntu 8.10 and it works just fine, my card has been removed from the new driver update for nvidia too, but i'm not worried, cuz i will still have 3D support just maybe not as new and snappy as i'd like.

Worst that'll happen is that you'll have to manually add a few DEV files and manually install the driver and let it's program build to the kernel you're using. Or you can just use envy.

I wish I could use envy to do stuff. I've got some right now just sitting around.

If Redmond doesn't pay you, they should.

I don't see what Nintendo has to do with this. 

Well, as Squilliam will no doubt inform you, the wii has similar video card issues. It's common knowledge that the Wii's inability to push polygons at rates similar to the 360 or any modern x86 compatible PC (with an MS owned OS), can almost entirely be ascribed to it's lack of directx support.

Hugs and kisses! We all know that Microsoft deliberately fails to support the Wii because they are jealous at the colour of white Nintendo uses. The Xbox 360 is sort of an off white colour, which infuriates Microsoft.

Hah, shows what you know. The Wii is the one that is off white. The Microsoft extended color standard indicates that the 360 is in fact white. You can whine all day that this isn't fully compatible with international industry color standards; however, at the end of the day the vast majority of artists use photoshop on a Windows machine which makes this the defacto industry color standard. Only Ivory tower academics and Communists use anything else.

Uhm, no, it's not. And it _is_ AMD's fault.

Linux never offered ABI compatibility guarantees for drivers. In other words it does not guarantee that as the kernel evolves your binary driver blob will keep working with it. What it offers is the chance for driver developers to place their driver's source in sync with the kernel tree, and then it will be compiled in an updated form by packagers and distributions (or even by users in source-based distros as Gentoo).

The choices for a developer then are:

1) accept Linux' model, that guarantees the compatiblity, by releasing the drivers source. That's what Intel is doing with its integrated GPUs

2) if releasing the source is not possible for patent infringement issues, release an easy way to recompile the driver module to interface with a closed source blob that is kept updated. That's what NVIDIA does, and their graphics driver support is the best under Linux

3) guarantee to the users that they will keep updating the binary driver. This is what AMD promised, this is what they stopped doing for the OT's hardware. It's a hardly viable solution anyway, good luck keeping pace with the kernel changes.

The policy under Linux for ABI compatibility is very clear and known, and was chosen so to not stifle evolution of the kernel subsystems. it was up to AMD to choose how to tackle the issue, and they overpromised and then broke their "contract". How is that not their fault?