It works …mostly
Well after a lot of pain, I finally got a good linux system up and running on my AMD64 with ATI x850. It seems to work alright for the most part, though there are a couple glitches. Currently my entire system locks up if I try to quit X. I have not been able to determine if this is a problem with ATI’s drivers or the kernel, or some combination of both. It only seemed to have happened when I got dual monitors working (finally).
The dual monitors works much like Windows once it works. The basic dual monitor or multi-monitor technology in linux is usually referred to as Xinerama, though it isn’t always the exact same technology. What I found out was that KDE had to be recompiled to become “xinerama aware” before it would work correctly in the dual monitor system. Before being recompiled, the system behaved exactly like I had one double wide monitor. That means things maximized across both screens, and dialog boxes popped up centered between the screens. I don’t know, yet, if other applications have to be xinerama aware or not, or if it was enough that KDE and its window manager are now. I will find out soon enough. If it isn’t, I’ll be sure to post a complaint about that here.
Note that recompiling KDE to be xinerama aware is a gentoo thing. Most common (binary) distributions will probably have this already built-in.
3D accelleration does not seem to be working either. DRI is apparently enabled, but when I run the glxgears test, I get 450fps or so. I see other people reporting 8000fps or higher, so I know that mine is not working correctly. I may, therefore, move to the open source radeon driver since it is rumored to be more stable. If 3d accelleration is all I have to sacrifice, then I haven’t lost anything.
I have the SAME issue you are having with Xorg and the lockup upon exiting. My system also locks up when i run dual monitors with separate screens, not Xinerama or clone. It usually locks up quickly after start Firefox, but it always does it upon exiting X when i run dual monitors. If you have any suggestions or have found out any information please share it. At this time i am getting frustrated with it and I’m contemplating going back to versions 6.x.
A lot of people are having problems with it. However, my problem was with any version of X and ATI’s drivers. I am currently using the open source radeon drivers, but have heard of other people getting the ATI drivers to work fine by using the vanilla kernel sources. That makes some sense, but I haven’t tried it. If I had unlimited time, I’d try to isolate which of the gentoo patches gives ATI’s drivers problems.