radeon driver not working

[Chad Perrin]

I'm having some pretty significant issues getting the radeon driver
working on my Thinkpad with a Radeon Mobility X300 graphics adapter.  Any
help would be appreciated.

my xorg.conf:
  http://sob.apotheon.org/img/xorg.conf

my Xorg.0.log.old:
  http://sob.apotheon.org/img/xorg.0.log.old

a photo of my laptop screen:
  http://sob.apotheon.org/img/hosed_screenshot.jpg

When I try to use the radeon driver, I get a screen that looks absolutely
awful (check above).  At first, I can mouse around on the screen, but
after a few moments that stops working.  I cannot get to a TTY console
with Ctrl + Alt + Fn, I cannot kill X to get back to a console via SSH
from another machine, and the longer I leave it the more of a runaway
process it becomes, so that top ends up reporting something like 120%
WCPU.  The only way to get the system back is to hold down the power
button until it kills the system, then restart it.

Oh . . . and it takes several seconds of black screen for the thing to
even figure out how to show the hosed-up black-and-white-bars screen in
the first place.

The ati driver has similar problems (though the ati driver isn't the one
I want anyway -- I just figured I'd see if it worked).  The vesa driver
works fine, though, with the exception of a brief ugly period when I
first startx before it figures out how to pain the screen.

Any suggestions?  What am I doing wrong?

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Patrick J. LoPresti: "Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1)
Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk
quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!"