After about a million forum posts, I've finally got it worked out. Hopefully someone will find this useful.

Why is there a problem?

ATI don't provide downloads for XFree86 4.3 drivers for their Radeon R200 (9200) & R300 (9500/9700) cards on their website. However, there are some out there, released by a European branch of ATI for the FireGL series of workstation cards, built on the same core.

NForce?

Yes, until very recently, the AGP support for the NForce2 chipset, and presumably the NForce1, was broken. No AGP8x for you, and probably lots of errors starting up.

So what do I do?

Well, you need a few things:

http

//www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_ati.html : the RPM (inside a zip) for the 4.3.0 driver, control panel, and various other stuff. alien(1)? is your friend if you run Debian on your desktop; but if you do, go and try RedHat 9 / XimianDesktop straight away.

http

//www.robbieward.co.uk/files/ati/build_mod.tar.gz : this is the code that builds a kernel module. It is updated with the source from NVidia for AGPGART. You don't need to load any modules.

http

//www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_nforce_1.0-0261 : For sound, networking etc... these are not linked to from NVidia's page. They're always a version or so behind.

NOT TO HAVE THE NVIDIA GRAPHICS DRIVER INSTALLED

My pain was caused by having GLX leftovers from the old NVidia card I had in this machine. Remove the NVidia driver (./NVIDIA-etc.run --uninstall) and you're away.

Install the RPM. Uncompress the .tar.gz into /lib/modules/fglrx (so the files are in /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/). Build a module for your kernel.

Now run fglrxconfig and create a configuration file. Copy all the other stuff that redhat-xfree86-config does so much nicer, and you're away laughing. Hopefully.

fgl_glxgears doesn't run on my machine (error: Error: couldn't get fbconfig) and I've love to know why. -- CraigBox

1? http://etudiant.epita.fr:8000/nonolk/ has some old patches, including the NFORCE AGP diff. --

WillemSmit? -- Last night i rebuilt my kernel and compiled the fglrx ati drivers after the reboot agp didn't work. I had to install the agp module with agp_try_unsupported=1 before I got X to work. Once this was done fgl_glxgears worked 100% running at 650 fps. But somehow i must have screwed something up, because after another boot I also got the same error as you (Error: couldn't get fbconfig). If you somehow figured out what causes this can you please leave a comment here so I can fix mine too. --