Help with Debian 6.0 (squeeze)

[jhu]

I just did a fresh install. My computer has an on-board ATI video chip that is in the R400 family. I had Debian 5.0 on this machine before and accelerated video worked just fine. After a clean install, all I had was software rendering under X Window. It's usable but slow. I applied "apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree" to get whatever microcode is needed for hardware acceleration. After that I can't even get the text console to show up (blank screen with monitor saying "input not supported"). So here're some issues I could use help with:

1) how do I revert back to the original video state? I did "apt-get remove firmware-linux-nonfree", but that doesn't work. I'm sure I'm missing something but I'm not able to find it.

2) how do I get these damn drivers to work? looking in the Xorg.log files, everything seems to be loading fine.

I don't really have another monitor to test this with. Regardless, video worked fine with Debian 5.0 so I don't think it's a monitor issue.

 

[zokudu]

http://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo

Do you have libgl1-mesa-dri installed?

 

[jhu]

All necessary files have been installed. There's just no video output. The first thing I want to do is revert to prior video settings. I had video output prior to "apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree". However, I don't exactly know what it did to reverse the effects.

 

[jhu]

Ok, got video back by blacklisting the radeon module. And then starting X Window, the radeon module somehow gets loaded and I have accelerated video too. Weird.

Now I get a blank screen when exiting X for the console. It's definitely all because of that radeon module.