After you startx, run lsmod and see if the radeon module loaded. The kernel module is what will provide the direct rendering.
Other things to check:
see if agpgart is detecting your agp chipset correctly -- look through dmesg for mentions of this, you may also have to modprobe agpgart.
See if your xorg.conf contains
Load "dri"
Load "glx"
Load "glcore"
(i'm fuzzy on this last one)
Make sure you have this section somewhere in your xorg.conf
Code:
Section "dri"
Mode 0666
EndSection
As is, check /var/log/Xorg.log.0 for errors.
--Shade
By the way -- fglrx does indeed work on laptops, but I don't think it works for the 7000. I'm running fglrx on my sony vaio laptop with a 9200 mobility.