The Radeon 8500LE nightmare

This is the story behind these packages:

Sometime in november 2002, ATI releases all new 2D/3D drivers for Linux/XFree86 that should work on any "Built by ATI" Radeon 8500 or higher card. I need a new graphics card and I think it would be nice to show appreciation, so I start shopping around, ignoring what "built by ATI" really means.
2002-11-28: My new graphics card is here. I test the board with the XFree86 4.2.1 driver, then I download the ATI driver version 2.4.3 and I spend a couple of hours debianizing the crappy RPM package; when I finally have a working installation, it turns out that it doesn't support my "powered by ATI" non-cheap board from Crucial Technology. I start peeking into the precompiled library with a strong intention to hack it.
2002-11-29: There is an article on Slashdot talking about this brain damage; I post a comment there. In the comments I find links to the DRI project, where in turn I find links to Debian packages of the CVS snapshot of dri-trunk. I build the modules and 3D works but it is really not as fast as I was expecting from this board. Really slow, in fact.
In the comments you will also find instructions on how to patch the ATI driver. Here is the original message at Rage3D.com, but I have not tried this, because...
2002-11-30: The ATI driver has been updated to version 2.5.1; the release notes say: "Powered By ATI" products install properly. After another day spent debianizing, I finally get it working 100%.
The following games work well: Quake 2, Quake 3 demo, TuxRacer, TuxRacer V1 demo, ArmageTron
I only have an issue with the display resolution. If I list several modes in the "Screen" section of XF86Config-4, like this:
```
  Modes "1280x960" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600"
```
the display appears at a resolution of 1024x768, which is not correct, and I can't switch to higher resolutions even by using Ctrl,Alt,+ and Ctrl,Alt,-. If I only list mode 1280x960, the display appears correctly.
2003-03-31: Cedric tells me that driver version 2.9.6 is available, but apparently it is meant to be used with Fire GL boards only: ATI's "find a driver" page brings you here or here (for example) if you select a Fire GL product, but if you select a Radeon board it brings you to the old 2.5.1 driver page.
However, I have packaged this version and it works OK.

$Id: ati-story.gtml,v 1.8 2005/11/10 22:34:40 flavio Exp flavio $