Hear yea! Hear yea! I have the ATI card installed and working. Before I forget how I did it I will document it here. Suspend/resume has worked a couple of times - keeping fingers crossed.
1 - deactivated nVida driver under Hardware drivers tool in Ubuntu
2 - pulled Dell nVidia card and installed MSI R5450 ($50 US at walmart.com)
3 - booted PC - got to "Running in low graphics mode" error (had some battles with that and nVidia early on)
4 - chose the option to fix graphics configuration - WRONG - rebooted to black screen
5 - booted from USB flash drive with isolinux and copied backup of nVidia xorg.conf over whatever step 4 had created
6 - booted back to "Running in low graphics mode" error and chose to run in low mode one time
7 - uninstalled nvirdia-current, nvidia-current- modaliases, nvidia-settings with Synaptic
8 - booted back to "Running in low graphics mode" error and chose to run in low mode one time again
9 - installed fglrx and fglrx-amdcccle with Synaptic
10 - booted back to "Running in low graphics mode" error and chose to run in low mode one time again
11 - downloaded and tried to install drivers from ATI web site - it told me that older driver was installed - uninstall it
12 - uninstalled items installed in step 9
13 - booted back to "Running in low graphics mode" error and chose to run in low mode one time again
14 - tried to install the drivers from web site again - same message about old drivers installed (but I noticed a message about running aticonfig --initial after installing drivers. I installed the stuff in step 9 again and ran aticonfig --initial.
15 - rebooted and had both displays working!!! but not to my liking
An slight detour here. I had my monitors setup as follows:
left monitor - Samsung Syncmaster 1280 x 1024 on a DVI cable
right monitor - Acer x223w 1680 x 1050 on an HDMI cable
Under nVidia they were configured as "separate X sessions" I believe it was called. Each monitor had its own panel and I had different launchers on each panel. Left monitor was #0 and the right monitor #1.
The ATI installer set the right monitor to #1 and the left monitor #2. The icons on my desktop were on the left monitor as they had been under nVidia but the only panel displayed was the one from the old right screen which was displayed on the right screen. @#$%^*&*)(^%!
16 - after tweaking with the ATI configuration tool to no success I edited xorg.conf and swapped the 0 and 1 designations for the two displays.
17 - rebooted and got the same thing.
18 - set the configuration to "Single display desktop (Multi-desktop)" whatever that means.
19 - rebooted and now I have my Desktop with a few files on it on the left monitor. The correct panel on the left monitor and the correct panel on the right monitor
I had to shuffle a couple of launchers which repositioned themselves even though they were "lock to panel" but that was an easy task. I have backed up the system, made a copy of xorg.conf for posterity.
Cheers,
Ken