ATI open source driver installation

Here are useful steps for the installation of the ATI open source drivers. I have targeted Ubuntu, but it should also work on Debian based distro.
Currently there is only one open source driver that is radeon and it is being actively developed. Ubunt comes with radeon installed by default and it's the driver it will load; you would not have to do anything, but if anything goes wrong then you can go for these steps.
Different versions of the drivers may be available depending on you distro, hence it you have to check for the respective driver’s for finding what is supported on your version.

1. First you have to boot in to safe mode or you have to kill X and drop to command prompt mode. Then create a new xorg.conf file using this command.

Code:

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sudo Xorg -configure

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2. After that system will create a new file (xorg.conf.new) and then drop it in to your root folder. After that simply move the file to the appropriate place.

Code:

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sudo mv /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf.new

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3. After that open the file for editing:

Code:

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sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf.new

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4. Now the file is no longer needed for the X to function, you can delete everything in the file and then just leave the section that is pertaining to your video device and then add the following line.

Code:

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Driver  "radeon"

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5. Then just save the file and rename it with xorg.conf so that X can identify it.

6. Restart you system or simply reboot X

You must know following thing about these drivers.

1. These driver are not having complete support for all the cards. You have check for the respective wikis for the support information.

2. These drivers have far better 2D acceleration and the accelerated movie playback compared to fglrx. Compiz and other composite managers

3. You cannot expect awesome 3D performance. According to my test radeon is having 20 to 50 percent the speed of fglrx.

4. On the bases of the hardware, the classic MES stack will provide OpenGL1.5/2.0 level acceleration. Things which are similar to WINE depend heavily on the high level of GLSL (+OpenGL2.1), hence you can expect the drivers to work with those applications.

5. These drivers have limited power saving features.

Thanks for the information you have provided, I am sure that it will be helpful to many users. I am having one studio older Radeon 9600 and I am not able to get it working properly. Can you provide any help for this problem I will be waiting for the related reply.