You have a few choices, including:
1. remove ati-drivers and stay with xorg 6.8. wait for a new ati-drivers that works with 6.8 to reinstall it. 2. add ">=x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8" to /etc/portage/package.mask to prevent the 6.8 upgrade from happening, and remove it once a newer ati-drivers is available.
This makes perfect sense, but it illuminates my ignorance of things video. How do I learn enough to make an intelligent choice between the two options? That is: 1) What do I give up by dropping ati-drivers?
3D hardware acceleration of your video card-- i.e., OpenGL. This means no 3D if you cannot use X.org's MESA driver (which afaik you cannot, as I don't think the Radeon Mobility series is supported).
2) What do I gain by going with 6.8?
Ummmm...someone else who actually uses it should answer more fully (I also have an ATI card, so have not upgraded), but afaik, you only miss some speculative features that are not yet fully implemented (like alpha transparancy and compositing). So in theory you could have transparent or semi-transparent windows on your desktop (irrespective of application), but as I understand it, this feature is riddled with difficulties and does not completely work.
On the whole, I don't think you'd be missing much by waiting to upgrade, especially if you actually use 3D acceleration on your system for any reason.
The usual 5-word explanations I get on this list is not informative (for me), because they usually assume I know a great deal more than I seem to actually know.
++ kevin
Hope this helped, then.
Holly
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