Kano (of Kanotix fame) provides this excellent script to install the latest ATI FireGL driver on yer Debian box. I have installed Debian Lenny x86_64 (5.0) on a new box with a AMD 780G chipset, that includes an on board HD3200 graphics processor.

Could I get the video working by installing the driver direct from AMD’s website?; eh no :(, and not only that but when I killed X with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace the box rebooted, and left my XFS filesystems in a bit of a state.

Kano’s script worked flawlessly, it did a variety of things:

• Installed build-essentials
• Installed GCC
• Installed dkms
• Downloaded the latest driver, built and installed a new .deb on my system
• Reconfigured X
• Restarted the login manager

/Me happy again

PS: you can see all of Kano’s excellent scripts here

Update: Power management seems to be broken with this driver, my monitor never turns off 🙁