I had a 9600XT, it used the fglrx drivers. I think only 8500 era and older hardware supports open (ie. free as in speech) 3D acceleration. The ATI drivers are the default, 2D-only x.org drivers. Radeon I think are the accelerated drivers for older ATI hardware - it won't work for you.
The fglrx drivers from distributions never worked properly for me - the only thing that did was downloading the installer from ATI. I've never had any problems with the ATI installer, so I don't know how much help I can be on the subject. You may want to make sure you have the "linux-restricted-modules" package installed for your kernel - on my install it was already there.
Generally you should try "dmesg" and check the result for error messages from fglrx.
Theoretically you should be OK if you make a copy of /etc/X11/xorg.conf before you run the fglrx install. If the install doesn't work right you should just be able to copy the file back.
There's some info here on setting up the xorg.conf file for the ATI Installer. Read it carefully.
The fglrx drivers from distributions never worked properly for me - the only thing that did was downloading the installer from ATI. I've never had any problems with the ATI installer, so I don't know how much help I can be on the subject. You may want to make sure you have the "linux-restricted-modules" package installed for your kernel - on my install it was already there.
Generally you should try "dmesg" and check the result for error messages from fglrx.
Theoretically you should be OK if you make a copy of /etc/X11/xorg.conf before you run the fglrx install. If the install doesn't work right you should just be able to copy the file back.
There's some info here on setting up the xorg.conf file for the ATI Installer. Read it carefully.