[raid517]

Ok I'm revistiting an old bugbear of mine. First I'm sorry if I'm posting in the wrong section, but the Linux section is pretty dead and hasn't recieved a view/response for months. But I am attempting to install the offical ATI drivers on my Mandrake 9.0 distro for my radeon 8500 graphics card.
As usual this isn't proving easy. I mean for cripes sake all I want to do is see OpenGL running under Linux.
I am a Linux newbi. I tried just clicking on the RPM package and it all seemed to go very smoothly. That is until I tried to change the resolution of my desktop, at which point nothing happend. No response, no error message, nothing. So I thought "maybe I should reboot?" Bad idea... When I rebooted KDE (indeed the whole graphical interface) refused to start up. I think the driver install killed my version of the X graphical server environment.
What I would love, what it has so far seemed impossible to obtain is a blow by blow account of how to correctly install and configure the official Radeon drivers in such a way that they are guaranteed to work under Mandrake 9.0
I think blow by blow is the operative term here, since I have beat my brain to a bloody pulp trying to work this one out.
I mean why does it have to be so difficult? If I could just see a nice 3D game running under Linux (I have some that will work) I think I could possibly live the rest of my life a happy man. (Well considering that my experiences so far have been fairly miserable...) I don't want to go back to using Windows all the time, I just bought a new 120Gig hard drive so I could install Linux. So any assistance anyone can offer me will be very welcome indedeed.

Many thanks in advance...

Q