I forgot to mention the other piece of hardware that I can’t get to fully work. My ATI Radeon 9200SE video card works perfectly, but Linux doesn’t support the TV output, and that’s the most important part for me!
I was hoping I wouldn’t have to buy a new card, but it looks like I’ll have to. I will definitely be purchasing a card that has Linux drivers by the manufacturer.
This is just another thing preventing me from going fully Linux.
I’ve Googled this issue to death and searched many forums, but there isn’t a way to get my TV output to work. If anyone out there knows how, let me know and I will pay you! Okay, no, that’s a lie. 
But I still want to know…
What was happening?
I am on the same quest.. I have tv-out working with my card using the vesa driver, but of course it lacks acceleration and playback is sometimes jerky. it’s an acceptable stop-gap, and also allows me to verify that everything else is working before hammering on at the driver issue. I have heard about the gatos driver, and tried numerous clever options in xorg.conf, so far nothing.
That’s exactly why I dropped off linux…. couldn’t watch movies on my tv using my fucking radeon.
DAMN LINUX.
Not DAMN LINUX.
DAMN ATI for not developing drivers for Linux — at that time.
i’ve got it working using the “fglrx” driver which is described here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fglrx
driver can be obtained here:
http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html
after you click on Linux x86 -> Radeon -> 9200 it takes you here:
http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/previous/linux-r-8-28-8.html
only issue is that it doesn’t support xvideo for tvout which is a problem for old hardware with slow cpu (like my antique 450mhz) because when you display fullscreen it has to do the scaling in software which will eat the cpu if it’s as old as mine, i suspect anything with a processor speed above 1Ghz wouldn’t have a problem. i actually do use mine to watch video but to avoid having too many framedrops i don’t use fullscreen. it can handle resizing up to about 3/4 of the screen before it maxes out the cpu.
here’s some info about xvideo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_video_extension
ati now provides a driver for the radeon 9200se that has all capabilities
The ATI driver for RADEON 9200SE is only for x86_64 ?? I need drivers for x86(aka 32bits OS) but I’m unable to find any. Can anyone suggest some alternative or there is not hope to have a working driver for this graphics card in a GNU/Linux system?