This graphics card is well supported in X.Org 6.9/7.0, but 2D only. In the development version, 3D acceleration is available too.
I spent a lot of time to get the ATI proprietary driver run. I gave up, it sucks. The best what I could achieve was to get the X server run, but without 3D acceleration and the server either freezes on its startup or on its shutdown (forcing me to reboot my computer). The free X.Org drivers are dozen times better.
My conclusion is that this card is very poorly supported on Linux by ATI. They don't provide specifications nor working drivers. Thanks to the great work of the nice and clever people who make the free driver the card is able to run on X.org at all, despite ATI obstructions. Unfortunately, this is not without limitations:
These limitations are fault of the graphics card vendor who doesn't support this card on Linux properly. What ATI gives you for your money is basically a 2D only card without TV output on Linux.
Due to some mismatch between current Linux kernels and X.org drivers the X server can't be started on the secondary graphics card, reporting the infamous error message Cannot read V_BIOS. I was able to fix the problem by applying the patch https://bugzilla.novell.com/attachment.cgi?id=86821 from https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=171453&x=0&y=0 (it required some manual editing). Now it works with Linux 2.6.17 and Debian xserver-xorg-core 1.0.2-9. And 3D acceleration works now too!
There is a very nice Multiseat HOWTO containing general instructions how to make multiseat work with X.Org 7.0. Unfortunately with two Radeon X300SE cards it doesn't work, when I start the second server the computer freezes.
The trick to get it work is to run the ATI proprietary driver on the first card (it doesn't start on the second card) and the X.Org driver on the second one. Then it works well for me until I log out on the first card (I run gdm without restarting the servers) in which case the computer freezes.
Milan Zamazal
<pdm@zamazal.org>
Last modified: 2006-07-27 16:55 UTC.