After hearing that ATIs drivers were ready for xorg 7, I couldn't resist taking a crack at it. AMD64 has it's own problems which we'll ignore for now, but after a bit of messing around, the 32-bit drivers (8.26.18)seemed poised to work. Everything compiled and seemed to get in it's proper place...until the modprobe.

From the install.log:
I went to single user mode to try to modprobe it myself, and got...Is that enough information to give anybody a clue of what's still wrong?

An update.
I have discovered that if I "rmmod radeon" and "rmmod drm" ... I can successfully "modprobe fglrx"

I did it, then changed my video driver in xorg.conf to "fglrx" and rebooted. As soon as it began to start X, it hung ... black screen, blank, totally unresponsive. I switched to a terminal session, and ran lsmod. None of the 3 modules showed up ... fglrx, radeon, or drm.

I think when I boot, there is still some confusion to the kernel about which modules should be loaded, but I couldn't find the list of modules. I suspect that it might include all three, and there is a conflict. How do I tell the boot process not to load "radeon", but rather "fglrx"?

There is a current thread related to ati in etch, but that problem seems to be different than mine, so I guess I'll resurrect this one since it already has my error messages laid out.

I have now got the AMD64 version to the exact same point as the 32-bit ... and I think I lack just a little piece of basic Debian knowledge to get it running. This is what I think I need to do ...

1. Disable the xorg ati modules from loading at boot, and
2. Enable the fglrx module, then
3. Edit xorg.conf to use the fglrx driver.

Steps one and two are what I don't know how to do. If you have another suggestion, I'm open.

Yippee! I got the proprietary drivers working on the 64-bit, and I know how to do it on the 32-bit side, as well. The key was getting the xorg ati drivers completely off the system before trying to install the proprietary ones.

You must have been excited. I noticed you added ATI to your distro

How did you get the xorg ati drivers off your system?

I'm trying to get my X600 working with FC5, and have gotten as far as [fglrx:firegl_init_module] *ERROR* firegl_stub_register failed from dmesg when I try to modprobe fglrx.

I removed xserver-xorg-video-ati, which took a metapackage named xserver-xorg-video-all with it. Changed xorg.conf to use vesa drivers ... rebooted to make sure the xorg modules didn't reload. Switched to single user mode, and I was then able to modprobe fglrx.

D'Oh! All I had to do was reboot, and the right module loaded fine.

Anyway, a saga in retrospect:
On Fedora Core 5, I basically just ran sudo ./ati-driver-installer-8.28.8.run. But:

I had some problems with the symlink at /lib/modules/$(version)/build... seems it wasn't ../../../ -ing enough. It should point down to /usr/src/kernels/$(version).

I had more problems with the /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/make.sh script, which was looking for the kernel source in /usr/src/linux... it's actually in /usr/src/kernels/$(version) on my system, so to get make.sh to work, I export KERNEL_PATH=/usr/src/kernels/$version) and that made make.sh happy(ier).

I had some trouble with getting the correct kernel-devel package installed; others should note that updating your kernel requires that you build the module against the correct devel sources (should be obvious, but something I missed and that if you're using a smp (multiprocessor/Pentium 4 HT/Pentium D) kernel, you need to match that as well. Fedora Core 5 package was kernel-smp-devel-$(version)-$(arch).rpm.

The aticonfig utility that ati will instruct you to use is GARBAGE. It totally trashed my xorg.conf config, and I had to restore it. Using aticonfig will make other nice things like system-config-display break with totally cryptic python trace errors. Instead of using aticonfig, I'd highly recommend just changing the existing driver from "radeon" (the default in my setup) to "fglrx" in xorg.conf. You can do this with system-config-display or with gedit/nano/pico/vi/emacs ;-)

Tips for finding out what went wrong:
- After running ati-driver-installer-8.28.8.run, look at /usr/share/fglrx/fglrx-install.log for errors. Errors are horribly not reported back to the GUI installer, so the GUI will be like, "Everything went great!" and this text file will be like, "You suck and have the uniprocessor kernel sources installed :P"

- Building by hand from /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/make.sh will dump out more obvious errors in the build process.

- If you build the module but it just won't load, run 'depmod', try 'modprobe fglrx', and look at 'dmesg'. Or, you could just reboot and have everything work, like me...

- If you build stuff wrong, like I did, it becomes more obvious using 'modinfo fglrx'. Compare the vermagic: line to the output of 'uname -r' to make sure the module matches your kernel.

- Be prepared to rebuild this driver the next time you update (yum/up2date/apt-get) your kernel.

- Slightly ot, but you can test that the hardware acceleration of the driver is working with 'glxinfo'. What you want is "direct rendering: Yes" Then, when you run glxgears, it won't totally blow goats and will actually move pretty quickly. And - playing ppracer won't be an exercise in futility.

Sorry... that was just a brain dump.

Can I see your xorg.conf?
The only way I can get a screen is to disable DRI in the kernel, or else it blackscreens at xservers start. I've tried to remove xserver-xorg-video-ati and reinstall ati's own driver, with the black screen as a result.

Here are the pertinant sections, but the file did not change as a result of the proprietary driver installation. I manually went into the file and changed the driver to "fglrx" after modprobing the fglrx kernel module.

Thank you, but I figured out what was wrong...A missing package caused the black screen i my case. But now I have a new problem: If I configure xorg via xorg.conf to use fglrx, I can't run a lot of programs... Nautilus, Openoffice, Synaptic, to name a few, simply won't run. But if I change back to vesa driver in the xorg.conf, all programs runs fine. What's wrong here?

Are you really using Sarge? I think you're bound to have trouble there. Sarge is not meant to upgrade, it's "Stable." Part of what that means is don't screw with it unless you really know what you're doing.

As far as Ati's driver's are concerned, what version did you get? ... And, did you just run the script, or did you create the Debian specific .deb files?

-Whoa, guess I forgot to fix that. No, I'm running Etch.
I created and installed from the specific .deb files from ati's 8.28.8 driver, as per method 2 on this page:
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Deb...allation_Guide

...and the "m-a a-i fglrx" seemed to work ok? Lsmod shows "fglrx?" Kinda hard to guess at what's wrong ... My experience is that after you try lots of things, something works, and I'm never sure what it was.

I'm having such a problem with fonts right now ... but I think I'm gaining.