ATI's drivers aren't every good and made my laptop unstable. Since I don't intend to do a lot of 3D on my laptop, I have stuck with the "radeon" driver. Even with the ATI drivers, I couldn't get UT2004 to run without artifacts or glitches. Tuxracer runs fine on the "radeon" driver but UT2004 is just as bad as the official ATI drivers.

I love my laptop and this card runs great in windows... sometimes. On linux, the ati driver will not work as it is showing as an ATI Radeon M9. ATI states that the manufacturer of the laptop has to be the ones to provide a driver for it as it might have been modified to fit Dell's needs. Well, Dell isnt working to hard on putting that driver out. Finally I came to the conclusion that maybe this machine wasnt meant for gaming so I settled with the standard Radeon driver and have been stress free since. Too many distros went on this machine and many lost hours of sleep trying to find the perfect one to make this card go. Just wanted to put my 3 cents in.

This card works okay under Linux with the stock Xorg drivers and with 3D acceleration and DRI enabled. The Glxgears FPS reading is about 1400-1500 fps. I had tried to install the proprietary fglrx driver and it did install, but it mucked up X quite a bit. I did average 2000 fps in glxgears. My touchpad, which had been working perfectly, stopped working and my laptop stopped wanting to suspend to disk.

Bottom line: ATI's drivers give a better framerate, but your X mileage may vary. The stock drivers are not that great for performance (especially compared to Windows drivers) but they work flawlessly with X.

Mandriva 2005 LE's auto detect gets this thing working pretty well. Armagetron works well with this card in Mandriva, but crashes upon selecting network play.
Slackware's default settings for it work fine for 2D acceleration but can't run anything 3D properly for me.
Fedora Core 3's Anaconda installer doesn't run properly unless I give it the linux nofb option at boot.
I have even had problems with this card under windows, and in general, family members running laptops with radeon mobility cards have had bizarre graphical glitches in games until installing 3rd party drivers.
ATI's website has the most infuriating sicknote I've ever seen from a major company: we can't provide laptop drivers because your screen might be customised.
This company doesn't deserve the cut they will get if you buy a laptop with a radeon mobility 9000. Avoid.