I'm pretty sure you don't have dri enabled. There is a DRI trunk somewhere, that I installed (instead of the vannilla Xfree) to enable DRI on my Radeon 7500.
Every solution I've seen on this mailing list were the same: To use that Xfree DRI trunk instead of the normal one. I don't remember how I've done it, but please search the ML archives: On the last 2 months, there were plenty of questions and answers about that. Google for "radeon 7500 dri" or "radeon 7500 debian dri", or something like that. I'm sure you'll find plenty of info. -- Joao Pedro Clemente jpcl @ rnl.ist.utl.pt