While ATI Technologies had launched the Radeon X1000 series in October of 2005, which was the first time in a quite a while (since the Radeon 9700) that they had implemented large architectural changes, the support under Linux simply wasn't there. In fact, even after the X1900 launch earlier this year the Linux support remained missing in action. Months later this ATI Linux support has yet to be found, that is until this afternoon with the public launch of the 8.24.8 display drivers.

[Phoronix]