X Upgrade on Squeeze

...because the ati proprietary drivers SUCKS!

The dust destroyed my previous ATI card, so I bought a new fanless HD5XXX series video-card (40€):

03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Cedar PRO [Radeon HD 5450] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

On squeeze the card worked, but not too well, so I installed the proprietary drivers (and got cursed by RMS). Well, I was not satisfied. Even the 3D is without doubt better, the 2D really suck. And I use the 2D way more than the 3D. The games I play are mostly 2D (warmux, wesnoth, the mana world, crawl, something else I don't recall). With the proprietary drivers even moving the windows around was a problem. No kidding, moving a window with a pdf was slow.

So i did the following:

1) Create an /etc/apt/preferences

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=stable
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=testing
Pin-Priority: 400

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 300

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: -1

2) modify the /etc/apt/sources.list

# deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ wheezy  main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ wheezy  main contrib non-free

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ sid main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ sid main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian squeeze-updates main

deb ftp://ftp.debian-multimedia.org squeeze main non-free

3) uninstall the ati shit

sh /usr/share/ati/fglrx_uninstall.sh

(or whatever is called)

4) reboot

5) install from sid the fresh stuff

apt-get install -t sid xserver-xorg-video-radeon libgl1-mesa-glx \ libgl1-mesa-dri linux-image-2.6.37-2-686 xserver-xorg libglu1-mesa \ libglu1-mesa-dev mesa-common-dev mesa-utils libgl1-mesa-dev

6) Reboot with the new kernel (I'm not sure the new kernel is really needed, but a lot was going on on the kernel modesetting thing)

7) delete the /etc/X11/xorg.conf

8) startx!

That's all folks!