Radeon driver and Xfree86

[Nick Wright <nick@lsd.net.nz>]

Hi All,

I have been using the proprietary driver from ATI to run my radeon
9600 in a dual-screen setup.

Unfortuantely the computer occasionally locks up (no kernel panic or
anything helpful to go on here). I realise there are any number of
reasons (hardware, software) that might be the cause of the random
lockups. They're happening about once a week at the moment.

I'd like to start with the video card driver though, as I have a
feeling this is the most likely cause. There are open source drivers
at dri.freedesktop.org. I'd like to give them a go as I am pretty sure
I've tried them out in the past and found them to be fairly decent. 

My question is how to go about setting these up on debian stable? Do I
need to download and build a bunch of custom Xfree stuff, patch my
kernel, etc etc? Is there a deb source for these drivers?


Thanks,

Nick