LinuxQuestions.org - Radeon 3850 in Debian Etch using Catalyst 8.7 driver

Argh. What a frickin PITA this has become. I've been wrestling with this for a week now.

All I want is accelerated 2D, I don't even care about 3D. Too much to ask for from ATI?

I have a stable rock solid Debian Etch system to which I added a new monitor and video card (Radeon 3850). I used Catalyst 8.7 to generate the .deb which built and installed without incident. I get a sharp display but it's as slow as molasses on a cold winter day. Clearly I don't have accelerated 2D. Rather than rehash everything I'll just list the pertinent links:
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=29283
http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1233

The bottom line is that I can't get rid of the "perpetual Mesa" and "can't acquire AGP", i.e.

fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: Mesa project: www.mesa3d.org
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect
OpenGL version string: 1.2 (1.5 Mesa 6.5.1)

for which I tried everything in http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Proble...rect_on_Debian without success. WTH is fglrxinfo looking at??

Of course there's also the AGP problem (from X log file):
(EE) fglrx(0): [agp] unable to acquire AGP, error -1023
(EE) fglrx(0): cannot init AGP

Today I discovered I can make this go away by loading the drm module at boot. That still doesn't help as it just replaces the "can't acquire AGP" error with:
(WW) fglrx(0): No DRM connection for driver fglrx.

That actually makes sense and is consistent with some recommendations I've seen, namely to just build drm as a module but not load it so it doesn't short circuit the fglrxdrm. That of course raises the question why fglrx "can't acquire AGP". I don't know what else to try. It just looks like in the case of the 3850 Catalyst 8.7 linux support is just broken. Maybe I'm not connecting all the dots. Works great under XP though. Argh.
Suggestions/recommendations (other than to pitch in favor of nVidia) are most welcome. Thanks in advance.