ATI proprietary drivers libraries conflict

Hello everyone,

I had DRI working fine in Xorg 7.0 with the open source radeon driver. However, this driver is limited and I wanted to take quake4 for a spin today. I downloaded ATI proprietary drivers from ATI's site and they installed fine. I ran aticonfig to generate a new xorg.conf using my existing one as input. The problem is that now I lost DRI entirely.

$ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: No
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect

glxgears runs at a pathetic frame rate, as expected, and ldd shows:

[Alpha]-(igor)-(/usr/X11R6/bin)
(17:42:25)$ ldd glxgears
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
libGL.so.1 => /usr/lib/fglrx/libGL.so.1 (0xb7eff000)
libGLU.so.1 => /usr/lib/libGLU.so.1 (0xb7e77000)
libglut.so.3 => /usr/lib/libglut.so.3 (0xb7e43000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0xb7e1d000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0xb7ce5000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0xb7c1f000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXext.so.6 (0xb7c11000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0xb7bfe000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/libdl.so.2 (0xb7bfa000)
libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (0xb7b19000)
libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xb7b0e000)
libXxf86vm.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXxf86vm.so.1 (0xb7b09000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7fa1000)
libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0xb7b05000)
libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXdmcp.so.6 (0xb7b00000)

I went through xorg.conf and everything looks good. Driver being used is fglrx. I think this is a library problem, meaning wring libraries are used for rendering. However, I have no clue how to fix this. Does anybody have any ideas how to go about fixing this?
Thanks in advance,
-NSKL

I think I hunted down the problem:

Looking carefull through Xorg log file with grep:

$ cat Xorg.0.log.old | grep DRI
(II) Loading extension XFree86-DRI
(==) fglrx(0): NoDRI = NO
(WW) fglrx(0): DRI is not supported on Radeon 9000/9100 IGP (RS300/RS350) hardware.
(II) Loading extension ATIFGLRXDRI
(II) fglrx(0): doing DRIScreenInit
(II) fglrx(0): DRIScreenInit done
(WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization failed!

Seems like my card is not supported for DRI using ati's proprietary driver just yet. Is there any workaround for this? Alternatively, I can use open source radeon driver to play quake4 but I need to apply the s3tc patch to the radeon module. Can anybody enlighten me on how I can do this the Debian way since it would be pretty messy to download the sources for both the module and the patch, compile them together and install them with make install.
Thanks,
-NSKL

Found an answer if anybody gets stuck in the same place. There is a tool called driconf that has an option to enable s3tc extensions. Did that, and quake4 for works fine now, but it's waaay too slow and certain textures such as the sky and the flashlight do not render correctly. In conclusion, it's basically unplayable. This is to be expected though. The graphics card is not very good and open source radeon driver is rather limited. Ooh well, I'll try giving quake 2 a spin then!
-NSKL