I am still rocking a Radeon 9600 in this Linux box. Because another post about getting it to work with compiz is the top search hit for this site, I will also post the most important thing I have learned about working with the Radeon under Linux.
The most important thing is this: You can have the radeon driver installed, or you can have the fglrx driver installed — but you cannot have them both installed, simultaneously. If you have radeon installed and and try installing fglrx, you will have no desktop effects even if radeon is the active driver and you normally would have them. And vice versa.
The second most important thing is this: should you need to remove fglrx, there is an uninstall script under /usr/share/ati, which you can run as root. The docs seem to forget about this point.
That is all, hope it helps!
