The Radeon 9000 is not at all compatible with Debian. I believe that because of Debian's affiliation with the XFree86 movement, developers are not able to develop drivers for the card in Debian's packaging format. Looking at ATI's web site, I see that they have .rpm drivers that should work with supported versions of Red Hat.

After building my computer, I first tried to instal Red Hat 7.2 and could not boot into the GUI. I had to remain in the Linux shell. I then decided to try to install debian with the same effect. I can only get monochrome text and a DOS-like screen. After several days of trying I finally gave up.

I am now in a "Catch-22" situation. I am not savvy enough to compile my own driver and because of the Commercial nature of Red Hat I don't know how to install rpms without going through there website. This is still a stand alone machine so for the time being, I guess I'm hosed.

For those who are running XFree86 4.3 there is a web site where someone did engineer a package for Debian, but I believe my Distribution (3.0r2) is using XFree86 4.1.02.

What a hassel.

1/29/2004 -- Update:

Thank you, Yapp, for your info. I sure do appreciate it.

I did find another way to get a GUI to work under the existing "Stable" release. When Debian asked for the video card at setup, I selected Vera and I was able get into Gnome and KDE.

Since I don't have any important data on my workstation yet, I've just been playing around with the installation at this point in time. I feel that you can read about Linux all day long, but there is no substiture for experience. Besides, all that time spent playing, messing up and learning has really kept my bar tab down!

Thanks again for all of your help!

mwjeff, you seam to run Debian stable... At least, not the most recent software. At least a recent kernel, like 2.4.x (or 2.6.x), is required. 2.2.x is very outdated. ;)

a little update: if you doubt between NVidia and ATI, let this enlighten you: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=125828

Hi,
THE 128 MB VERSION WORKS EXCELLENT, TOO
First, like 1 year ago I tried with SuSE 7.3 That didn't work because the Xfree Version was to old.
Then I tried with RedHat 9 and it worked perfect.
Now I'm using Mandrake 9.2 and it works great, too.
I even get a better resolution than in Windows! In Linux I can set the resolution to max. 1400x1050 and in Windows 98 and XP only to max. 1280x1024.
I haven't tried with games but I'm going to soon.

My video card, a Radeon 9000, works without any problems with the Fedora Core 1, Mandrake 9.2, and KNOPPIX 3.3 (Based from Debian Linux) distributions.

I use the XFree driver and it rocks.
I have full 3d support.
Before using this driver I tested ATI's one but with no success. I had lot's of problems but now it's ok!

There are a few threads around the forums concerning the set up of the proprietry drivers. Just some notes:

* Using these drivers on Slackware is still fine, you can use the rpm2tgz tool followed by installpkg

* You can use these drivers (at it's current state - 2004-07-02) on X.org BUT you cannot use them on Xfree86 4.4

* You NEED this driver to play games BUT you do NOT need it if you just want to use 2D things like surfing or e-mails

* You may experience freezing while game play - probably due to bugs in the driver. I've experiencing this on a vanilla install of Slackware 10, I'll report back if I find a work around or fix :)

Steve

> This card is detected well with all distributions,
> but the framerate is only about 30-40 fps with
> the stock Xorg drivers.

You should add these lines to the radeon driver section:

Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "off"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"

the stock Xorg driver uses AGP 1x by default, which makes it much slower then it can be.