Ok - I have never used an ATI card on Linux as well...their drivers are piss poor from what I read. I have my dell with a ATI Radeon X600SE and was wondering if I should bother installing the ATI drivers or should I just stick with the "Vesa" driver I am using now.

What do you guys recommend beyond installing an Nvidia card.

At least use Xorgs 'ati' drivers. You can get some acceleration with exa that way, as well. I think ATI's proprietary drivers an be made to work fine on 32-bit systems up thru Xorg 6.9, maybe even 7.0, not sure. They will NOT work on 64-bit systems, tho.

So your saying I should edit my xorg.conf file and change the driver to "ati" from "vesa"?

I would suggest you go to the ATI site and download the installer. It will detect what
version of X you have and as long as you have the sources to the kernel you are running
you shouldn't have any problem. You just need to run aticonfig after the upgrade and
it will give you some examples of how to configure it for your setup.

While their not even close to giving the support NVIDIA has (which is one reason I support
NVIDIA over ATI), they have gotten better with their drivers.

Zackarya

Taken from the Jem Report for ATI Drivers in SuSE 10.0 and 10.1 (if this is applicable)

ATI video drivers

SUSE Linux 10.1 ships with the newly revamped open source radeon driver. That may be fine for 2D rendering, but it doesn't do direct rendering for 3D graphics. To get hardware 3D acceleration (and for XGL support), you still need the proprietary ATI fglrx driver.

Go to the ATI Web site, click on Drivers & Software, then Linux Display Drivers and Software, then on the driver appropriate to your video card. 32-bit SUSE installations need the x86 drivers, and 64-bit SUSE needs the x86_64 versions. After you have clicked the link for your card, yet another link comes up. Click it, scroll down to the downloads table, then right-click the ATI Driver Installer download link and save it to your home directory. You do not need to download any of the other packages.

After the file transfer completes, close all open programs, then press ctrl-alt-F1 to switch to the first virtual terminal. You'll see a text-mode login prompt; log in as root. When you're at the command prompt, type in this command:

init 3

You'll see a bunch of text scroll by, and then a message saying that runlevel 3 has been reached. Press Enter to get the command prompt back, then type the following command in to switch to the directory you downloaded the ATI driver to:

cd /home/username/

Substitute your user name for "username" in the above example. Now you need to change the ATI installer permissions so that it can be run from the command line.

For long file names, you don't have to type the whole name into a terminal window. Instead, just type the first few letters and then press the Tab key, and the file name will be automatically completed for you. This is useful in situations like the one you're in now, where there is a long and complex file name to type in. So type the following command into your terminal, and use the Tab key to complete the ATI driver file name, then press Enter to execute the command:

chmod +x ./ati-driver

That will make the program executable; this must be done before you can run it. Now it's time to run the installer. Again, use tab completion instead of typing the name in. You have to add the ./ before the filename to tell the terminal program that the file you are referring to is in the current directory. If you don't specify that, the terminal will look in other places for the file. It sounds crazy, yes, but that's the way GNU/Linux is (and Unix before it). For the below example, the entire file name is typed in. Please note that this may not be the same file name that you downloaded -- it is only an example. You should use tab completion when you type this command in so that you don't accidentally mis-type the long file name. The part of the example that will not change is the switch statement after the file name (the part with the dashes). Here's the example command for the ATI driver installer for a 32-bit system:

./ati-driver-installer-8.24.8-x86.run --buildpkg SuSE/SUSE101-IA32

And for a 64-bit system:

./ati-driver-installer-8.24.8-x86_64.run --buildpkg SuSE/SUSE101-AMD64

After a few dozen lines of text, a driver package will be created. Go ahead and run it with the following command (the first example is for 32-bit systems):

rpm -ivh fglrx_6_9_0_SUSE101-8.24.8-1.i386.rpm

And for 64-bit systems:

rpm -ivh fglrx64_6_9_0_SUSE101-8.24.8-1.x86_64.rpm

Update your system environment variables with this command:

ldconfig

Next, you need to tell SUSE that you want to use this driver instead of the standard one:

aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Lastly, you have to tell YaST which driver to load (that's a zero in the example, not a letter):

sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx

Now reboot your computer by typing the following command:

reboot

The next time your system starts, you'll have hardware 3D video acceleration. Please note that every time you update your kernel, you must re-install the ATI video driver.

are these instructions applicable to ubuntu dapper?