I am running the most recent Arch Linux (Noodle). I installed xorg (X11R7) and xfce using pacman.
When running the xorg configuration utility, it sets up the video driver as "radeon". When X is started, it hangs because there is no module "radeon". (In /usr/lib/modules/drivers, there is only one default vga driver.)

Finally, I used pacman to get the ati driver package. This compiled successfully, but I cannot find where it put the drivers created.

I feel that I am very close to getting it all working, but obviously missing some subtleties....(My video card is Radeon 7500)

BTW, without configuring xorg (no xorg.conf file), XFCE still starts fine. It defaults to 1280x1024 resolution and gives some other options-- at least one of these crashes the system if tried.

did you tried "vesa" drivers ? i've been thorugh this last night and i spend my whole night configuring this...finally got x up and running...my chipset is "ATI readon 9000 IGP"... VGA wont work !

Where would you get the vesa drivers? With xorg package?

yes, they are included in the latest xorg package , when after doing "xorgconfig" it'll ask you that you manually want to choose the drivers or not , hit "y" and enther, there you'll see at number "0" VESA something something...if you let it choose by itself then it'll choose the VGA drivers which wont work with ATI , atleast they didnt in my case

OK--I found the drivers file in both Ubuntu and Arch:

Ubuntu: /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers---MANY are there, including ati, radeon, vesa. All are of the form ati_drv.o

Arch: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers---only one driver is present: vesa_drv.so

With Arch configured to use the vesa driver, the original problem persists.

Why does Ubuntu xorg come with MANY drivers, and Arch only with one?
Is the difference between *.o and *.so significant?
Could I simply copy some drivers from the Ubuntu folder to Arch?

This got solved--see my thread on xorg video drivers in Linux-General.
With xorg7, you have to get drivers separately.....