What we must remember… the very same ati drivers end up working on ubuntu, and many other distros including deb and rpm based distros. I mean not just working but working great. I’ve spent entire days working on my deb (squeeze, testing and Sid) ati proprietary and all for nothing… I did get it working on one using a non deb kernel but the other machines no luck. I think the problem lies in something to do with the kernels --- on debian the nvidias seem to install with no problem. It’s very weird. it could come down to one oddly placed file or missing this or that. Deb is a good distro but we can’t keep wasting our lives it really should be sorted out at the distro team level….but maybe we can all make some progress by looking at things more carefully.

Once I had done this, the AMD GUI installer worked flawlessly.
As you can see from my previous comment, I was quite wound up about it - I only solved it because I ran module-assistant, which installed the IA32 libs as a dependency, then I saw some advice to purge the free drivers, & realised my mistake.

This is what it actually fails on:
cp: cannot stat `./usr/X11R6/lib64/modules/linux’: No such file or directory
dh_install: cp -a ./usr/X11R6/lib64/modules/linux debian/fglrx-driver/usr/lib/xorg/modules/ returned exit code 1

This is a huge pain - I naively believed that the ATI installer would work (silly me!) - well yeah, it installed a config GUI and so on, but not the fglrx.ko module, so useless.
Anyone help with this, please, its a nightmare

$ sudo sh make.sh
AMD kernel module generator version 2.1
doing Makefile based build for kernel 2.6.x and higher
make.sh: line 412: cd: 2.6.x: No such file or directory
rm -rf *.c *.h *.o *.ko *.GCC* .??* *.symvers
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.26-2-686/build SUBDIRS=/usr/src/modules/fglrx modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.26-2-686′
make[2]: *** No rule to make target `/usr/src/modules/fglrx/firegl_public.c’, needed by `/usr/src/modules/fglrx/firegl_public.o’. Stop.
make[1]: *** [_module_/usr/src/modules/fglrx] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.26-2-686′
make: *** [kmod_build] Error 2
build failed with return value 2

At this point I quit in frustration and just ran the ATI installer. That worked (apparently) and I notice the libglx.so file has been replaced with one installed at the time I was running the ATI installer.

The screen isn’t flickering the way it did with the vesa driver, so something has changed, but windows are slow to move and don’t go semi-transparent in the process like they used to. Something still needs to be tweaked.

Also, this step failed with the following errors:
dpkg-shlibdeps: error: couldn’t find library libc.so.6 needed by debian/fglrx-driver/emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libfglrx_pp.so.1.0 (ELF format: ‘elf32-i386′; RPATH: ”).
Note: libraries are not searched in other binary packages that do not have any shlibs or symbols file.
To help dpkg-shlibdeps find private libraries, you might need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
dh_shlibdeps: dpkg-shlibdeps returned exit code 2
make: *** [binary] Error 1
dpkg-buildpackage: error: debian/rules binary gave error exit status 2

The lack of a libc.so.6 was the problem. After fixing this, I came to another error complaining about fglrx_gamma… I found the solution at http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Hardy_Installation_Guide#Fix_for_an_error which basically involves extracting the driver then setting a link to the package - the shell script seems to be looking for a misnamed package. After that, the buildpkg worked - leaving me with 4 packages.

Will keep you posted on whether I got a successful install or not.

The “ATI Catalyst™ Display Driver” released in March 26 2009 do not need to kernel sources be downloaded.

In fact, some conditions applies:

1) The drivers above support English only.
2) The display driver requires POSIX shared memory to be enabled on the system.
3) Kernal Sources package is no longer required if Kernel Header package is installed.
4) 32-Bit packages must be installed for 64-Bit Linux drivers to install or work.

Info extracted from: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Legacy/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx?type=2.7&product=2.7.4.3.3.3.1&lang=English

Hope this helps.

xt4mhz

You can also use sgfxi to move between free and non-free drivers or roll back to native free drivers: Key commands are:

-n Automatically installs correct native xorg nv, intel, or ati driver for your
system. Cleans up old binary driver stuff, updates xorg.conf with new driver
information, and cleans nvidia and fgrlx stuff out of xorg.conf
-N Force install of specific xorg driver.
Syntax: sgfxi -N
Supported Xorg drivers: ati i128 i740 i810 i810-modesetting intel mga
neomagic nv radeon radeonhd sis tdfx vesa vga voodoo
Also configures xorg.conf as required. Full radeon xorg 3d configuration
automatically.
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