Debian Installation Guide

As of November 2005, ATI's drivers are in the non-free area of Debian. Make sure your /etc/apt/sources.list contains "contrib non-free" as well as main. You will, however, have to build your own kernel modules.

Which install method?
There are two methods that can be used to install the fglrx driver in Debian. The first, and recommended way is to use the native Debian packages directly from the non-free repository. The second, which may be required for newly release drivers, is to generate the Debian packages directly from the ATI installer. Both methods are documented here. After the packages are installed, the remaining steps are common, regardless of the install method chosen.

Install the driver
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install module-assistant fglrx-driver fglrx-kernel-src

Download the ATI driver installer
Download the driver packages directly from ATI. You need to download the ATI installer, not the RPM packages for this method to work.

Build the Debian packages
Change to the download directory. sudo apt-get install module-assistant build-essential fakeroot dh-make debconf sudo sh ./ati-driver-installer-8.24.8-i386.run --buildpkg Debian/sarge (or sid, etch, etc.) This should create 5 .deb packages in the current directory. If this step succeeded without any errors but there are no packages, check the /tmp directory.

Install the driver
You might get some errors regarding dependencies during the dpkg process. You can ignore them since they should be resolved when you run the upgrade step. sudo dpkg -i fglrx-control_8.24.8-1_i386.deb sudo dpkg -i fglrx-kernel-source_8.24.8-1_i386.deb sudo dpkg -i xorg-driver-fglrx_8.24.8-1_i386.deb sudo apt-get -f upgrade

Compile the kernel driver
sudo module-assistant prepare sudo module-assistant update sudo module-assistant a-i fglrx

Update the xorg.conf file
sudo aticonfig --initial

Now restart X, or reboot for the driver changes to take effect.

Confirm that it worked
$ fglrxinfo display: :0.0 screen: 0 OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc. OpenGL renderer string: MOBILITY RADEON 9700 Generic OpenGL version string: 1.3.5461 (X4.3.0-8.19.10)