ATI Driver installation

The ATI drivers are available from the Livna repository. The first thing to do is make the livna repository available to pirut. The easiest way to do this is to run this command:
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm

Now, you should be able to run pirut ("Add/Remove Software" from the main menu) and search for fglrx. You want to install the xorg-x11-drv-fglrx package. It will install the kmod-fglrx as a dependency. For some reason, the rpm installation process doesn't seem to run this command:
/usr/sbin/ati-fglrx-config-display enable
so, do that by hand. This will make the ATI OpenGL libraries accessible.

I can't remember if the livna rpm does this for you or not but, if it doesn't, you will want to run
/usr/bin/aticonfig --initial
This will add sections to /etc/X11/xorg.conf to have X use the new fglrx driver. You'll also want to add
Modes "WWWWxHHHH"
to the Display subsection in the aticonfig-Screen section, where WWWW is the width of your screen in pixels and HHHH is the height of your screen in pixels. This will give you the proper display size.

I also added this line to Module Section:
Load "extmod"
It fixes problems with rendering window corners in the Bluecurve theme and black windows during Alt-Tab window switching.

Probably the best thing to do now is reboot. But you could probably get away with just restarting the X server. Once you have rebooted, or restarted X, you can tell if the ATI driver is properly installed by checking a couple things.

1) Check that the kernel module is installed:

[/] /sbin/modprobe -l fglrx
/lib/modules/2.6.18-1.2849.fc6/extra/fglrx/fglrx.ko


2) Check that the OpenGL library is being picked up:

[/] fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 Generic
OpenGL version string: 2.0.6174 (8.31.5)


3) Check that direct rendering is enabled:

[/] glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: Yes


I had a big problems when I did my installation but in the end the problem was simply that the ATI open GL libraries were not available. My original fix was to remove /usr/lib64/libGL.so.1.2 and create a link from that file to /usr/lib64/ati-fglrx/libGL.so.1.2. So, if all else fails, you may want to try that but it is really a kludy way of fixing things.

To see some 3D in action try
fgl_glxgears
I get about 1400 fps on my system.