Re-download the link in my last post. This time the correct driver is in the tar.gz file. It should show as version 1:6.13.0-3-mdv when installed.

Thank you.

I've installed it in my system.
This driver supports KMS, but it freezes when it is enabled after a while.

With KMS disabled, it seems to work, but it needs more testing.

I've tried to upgrade to Debian's latest driver and it produced a freeze again also without KMS, so it is not sounds good for the future of the ati driver & 200m card.

Maybe it would be good trying the Debian's 6.13.0.2 without KMS, because now I don't exactly remember if I tried exactly this driver without KMS enabled, but now I'm very tired.

I think I will try that tomorrow and I hope Mandriva's version will work with KMS turned off.

Anyway, did you use alien to transform the package or some other tools?

Are you disabling KMS for the radeon driver with "radeon.modeset=0"?

I extracted the driver from the Mandriva package and rebuilt the Debian package with the Mandriva driver.

I am disabling it via radeon-kms.conf in modprobes.d with option "radeon modeset=0", then regenerate initramfs.

What tool did you use to rebuild it?
Sorry for this question, I just would like to know the method.

I don't really understand why I didn't have problems in Mandriva with this driver and why I have in Debian with the same version... maybe there could be problems in some of it's dependencies, or... I don't know.

I used dpkg to rebuild the .deb package.

Thanks.

Interesting topic: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?p=153437
Also: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28402

Although my kernel is newer (2.6.35.8), I could produce my freezes with the stock kernel in Debian (and also with 2.6.36).
I've just found interesting this - maybe similar - problem...

Anyway, the system still seems working with the older radeon driver.

Thank you very much your help again.

My system is stable since I've installed version 6.12.6-1_amd64 of the radeon and ati package.

The difference in the images I can see is the lack of KMS and wakeup from standby support.
Otherwise, it works absolutely perfectly.

I am just afraid this problem will remain for a while (just like the wakeup from standby bug) and I have to throw my notebook to the trash if I would like to keep my system up to date (for example, continue to use Debian testing when they've released Squeeze).

So thank you again your help.

I'm glad I could help! My laptop is still on 6.12.4, I'll probably upgrade it soon and see if I get these same problems.

Please let me know the results after you upgraded your system also if there are no problems after that.

I hope the problem will be solved by the radeon developers or by an improved version of other X components and you will not have it.

Thank you again your help.

Well I updated my radeon driver. I had to set radeon modeset=0 to get compositing back. Everything seemed to be fine for the first hour after. Multiple reboots were all successful too.

I came back to my laptop a couple hours later to find the laptop frozen, and the HDD indicator on, but not active. I had no choice but to do a hard shutdown. Upon reboot I was getting errors:
This seems like a hardware failure, and not so much a file system corruption from the shutdown.

Can you see something in the SMART table of the HDD?
...or how about copying the data to /dev/null by dd (for example) /after backup/?

It really seems to be an HDD or controller failure.

Edit: Maybe badblocks is a good tool to test te HDD when you can't find any interesting information in other ways.
After a full backup, you can try read/write tests with 00, 01, 10, 11 default patterns written to disk.

Seems the laptop is experiencing power issues, which may be the cause of the hard drive failure. So I may not be able to test the current radeon driver with the 200M chipset.