This little exercise is aimed at people who don't really know what they're doing, and just want to get the driver working with hardware acceleration support; and it only addresses the drivers provided in the Debian repos. They do work, and they are intended to be used. I think the most common problems are caused by people mixing releases (Sarge, Etch, Lenny, Sid) without knowing what they're doing, but that's another subject. The commands are the ones I use. If you don't know how to translate aptitude or vim to the application of your choice, you should not be using Debian. It should go without saying that you need non-free in your sources.list
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1. Make sure you are running the current kernel for your release. $ uname -r tells you what you have currently, and $ aptitude search linux-image-2.6 will tell you what is available.
2. # aptitude install module-assistant build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-control fglrx-driver fglrx-kernel-src
3. RTFM. $ man fglrx ... That output contains a list of all the cards supported by the current driver. Make sure you find yours there. I believe some of ATI's older cards are no longer supported, and some of the newer ones may not be supported in the packages contained by the release you are using.
4. Reboot into Single User Mode. Enter the root password.
5.
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# m-a prepare
# m-a a-i fglrx
# modprobe -v fglrx
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Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies Inc RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200G Series]"
Driver "fglrx"
BusID "PCI:1:5:0"
EndSection
That's it. I've done it dozens of time, it takes about 10 minutes, and it always works. If you somehow screwed it up, start over ...
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# aptitude remove fglrx-amdccle fglrx-control fglrx-driver fglrx-kernel-src
# aptitude purge fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-control fglrx-driver fglrx-kernel-src
# rm -rf /usr/src/modules/fglrx/
# rm -rf /etc/ati
If it still doesn't work, give up. Go to Step 6 and replace "fglrx" with "ati" The Xorg drivers are not all that bad. You can try again some other time.
Note: If your release does not include fglrx-amdcccle, don't worry about it, you don't need it. As of this writing, I think it's included only in Sid, and I still haven't figured out what it is supposed to do.