If you arg thinking of buying a new graphic card, and want to choose ati.... i wouldn't recommend that.
Although oficially ati has "catalyst" drivers for their new cards - it didn't work on mine (which is supported) i have recently bought a new computer. my old one had nvidia , and my new has ati 4550 passive. on nvidia, as i recall. if i didn't have distribution specific drivers, i could install the binary one. picking it was easy. there was only one to pick from. i installed it, and it worked. on ubuntu, there was a distribuition speceific driver and it worked out of the box in ati - i had to choose from a list of around 20. neither had 4550 as an option. i chose the one marked as 'X550' i installed the driver, it didn't tell me if it was the right driver or not. rebooting as they asked, and running X, i got a distorted screen with horizontal lines on it. i erased /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and tried installing the driver again. when i ran "aticonfig --initial" it refused as i had no xorg.conf i tried 'X -configure' (which worked before i installed the driver), but it failed with sig 11. and now i do not have X, to find how to uninstall it ... it was good i had a backup of my xorg.conf (with the opensource driver) ati gave a link to where to send bug reports. i followed the link just to find a page full of information which didn't have any place to put a bug report on. after nevigating for some time i found where i can fill a bug report. but i have to register first. i had to fill in many fields like what version of their catalyst driver i was using (and of-course the version which i downloaded the same day from their site wasn't there). in the end i filed a bug report and went to bed. A day later i got an email: just press this link and login, and you will find an answer i loged-in -> again many detailes, neither relevant. i pressed the link again. this time one link was relevant - it was an answer to my bug report and it was: quoting: "Although we have drivers for Linux posted on the ATI website, we do not provide technical support for driver or multimedia issues in Linux directly. " so i say again. i wouldn't recomend buying from ATI. from now on. no ati neither amd for me. (with nvidia i used twinview and tv-out. i hope the opensource ati driver supports this ...) cheers, erez.
