ATI proprietary driver vs. Ubuntu Hardy (Radeon 9250 128MB)

Approaching with much pessimism, I didn't really expect this to work.  After some struggles with the NVIDIA proprietary driver,  All I wanted to do was find out what would go wrong and why.

My disappointment was mainly in the lack of a solid answer for the problem... On the net, there are a lot of people who all had the same problem with the same exact driver, yet nobody got a straightforward, solid answer.

Here are the steps to reach the same fail message:

[On Ubuntu 8.04.4 desktop]

• Be in possession of an old ATI card that is in the same time period as the Radeon 9200;
• Use the ATI site support.amd.com to locate the driver for your card.
• If the driver is 8.28.8 for Linux x86, download it.  If its a different driver... you probably have a newer series of video cards and this may not apply to you.
• use $ chmod +x ati-driver-installer-8.28.8.run , to make the file executable.

$ sudo ./ati-driver-installer-8.28.8.run 

Creating directory fglrx-install
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing ATI Proprietary Linux Driver-8.28.8.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
-e ==================================================
-e  ATI Technologies Linux Driver Installer/Packager
-e ==================================================
Detected configuration:
Architecture: i686 (32-bit)
X Server: unable to detect
Removing temporary directory: fglrx-install

So that ended that.  Searching around, near and far, I was not able to find an answer that was concrete.  I'll make an educated guess, and provide the information I could gather myself:

Going back to the starting point:  On the AMD site, there is a download which includes  "Automated installer and Display Drivers for XFree86 4.3 and X.Org 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.1".

The NVIDIA 71xxxx driver would not work with Xorg versions newer then a certain version, so I looked at the version on my Hardy system to find out if this was the case:

$ Xorg -version

...

X.Org X Server 1.4.0.90

...

Ok, so huh?  This AMD driver was released in 2006 so how is their Xorg version so much higher then Ubuntu from 2008?  According to the Distrowatch page for Ubuntu, "Breezy" released in 2005 had Xorg version 6.8.2, but next year, the "Dapper" release in 2006 had Xorg version 1.0.2.  So this must mean the version numbering dropped back to 1, in 2006.  Ultimately, this version is newer then the ones mentioned by the ATI proprietary download site.

So my X Server might not be detected because it confuses the ATI installer, with its version being 1.x, when the installer is looking for 6.x or 7.x.
 
But again, my big concern is why nobody is saying this clearly. 

Interestingly, the command "apt-cache search fglrx" reveals a certain xorg-driver-fglrx package which might have the same binary.  If this has been fixed to work in the newer X.org X Server, that definitely means that somebody figured out the problem with the binary on the ATI site, and fixed it, but didn't explain what was broken.

My conclusion:  the experts were so exasperated with the problem -- for which the answer must have been so obvious to them that they forgot to tell us newbies what it was.