Trying to install Video driver to use for my ATI 3870

Question

I play Enemy Territory and I am pretty sure I need to install the ATI driver s0 I downloaded an ATI driver from the ATI AMD webite but then I read something about not using the ATI installer an to use the Arch installer if this is the driver I am supposed to use how do I install it using the Arch installer? I read this
Obtain the PKGBUILD and fglrx.install files from CVS or ABS. Either:
    * Visit http://www.archlinux.org/packages/12877/ and click "View CVS Entries" to find them
the link is dead 
( by the way I am using 64bit Arch)
instructions say;
*  Run abs as root and locate the files in /var/abs/extra/catalyst.
[edit] Editing the PKGBUILD and building
Three changes need to be made here:
First, change
   pkgname=catalyst
to
   pkgname=catalyst-KERNEL_NAME
where KERNEL_NAME is whatever you want (e.g. custom, mm, themostawesomekernelever)
Second, remove kernel26 from the dependencies list.
Third, change
   _kernver=${_kernel_version}-ARCH
to
   _kernver=`uname -r`
so I go to try this but first I had to install ABS I installed ABS and then try to run it
sudo abs
==> Starting ABS sync...
rsync: failed to connect to rsync.archlinux.org: Connection refused (111)
rsync error: error in socket IO (code 10) at clientserver.c(122) [receiver=3.0.2
only to get that error

Answer 1

sam wrote:
Ok, I think I understand the problem.  You have a very recent video card, and back in the days of gutsy, the catalyst driver that shipped with ubuntu didn't support your card (or maybe it had a poor support) for your video card.  So ubuntu either installed a poor catalyst driver for your card or installed the open source version which had better support (at first) for your video card (but lacked 3d acceleration as mentioned above).  However, the catalyst driver in the repo support your video card (ATI says so):  https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/ … linux.html.
So pacman -S catalyst will install the catalyst and its dependency catalyst-utils.  It will also install a newer kernel 2.6.25.  After the driver installs, you are going to have to set it up.
The following links showed help
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Composite
You may have screen corruption problems or other minor video problems and you will need to tweak your xorg.conf file (this is going to require google and frequent system restarts or X11 restarts via ctr+alt+backspace).  Again, you maybe be lucky and you might not have to do the last part, it all depends
thanks I am used to messing around with the Xorg file just no in Arch