Installing fglrx (ATI) drivers under Debian

First useful post that will be translated from Spanish to English, from mine old blog.

Requirements

• Have an ATi card
• Xorg 7.1 (not sure if 7.2 is compatible, I am not using Linux at the moment)
• Have super user access
• Non-Free and contrib repositories enabled
• Have kernel headers installed

Recommendations

• Do _NOT_ hand edit the Xorg.conf file if is not needed and without any reason, this could break your X environment
• Install fglrx-control package, it contains the ATi Catalyst Control Panel
• Be sure of having an upgraded operating system, this could be done with apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
• Backup this file /etc/X11/Xorg.conf before doing anything

This is quite easy, and I’ll explain what the following commands will do, first of all, we install module-assistant, fglrx-driver and the fglrx-kernel packages, then we use module-assistant to compile and install the fglrx driver and to finish, we use aticonfig command for configuring the Xorg configuration

# apt-get install module-assistant fglrx-driver fglrx-kernel-src
# module-assistant auto-install fglrx-kernel-src
# aticonfig --initial

After this steps, reboot your graphical environment and you will have 3D acceleration. If this didn’t work replace/etc/X11/Xorg.conf with the backup that you have made. Tested with a RX1550 on Debian Lenny.