as you have discovered, these newer drivers are a bit of a problem… which is probably why the repo doesn’t have the latest versions.
in my opinion, the 9.2 to 9.6 drivers were not worth the effort since they were not very stable (at least for me), but… the recent 9.8 driver is much better and i encourage you to give it a try (as i am doing, with both fingers crossed).
if you managed to build a rpm and install it, then ran aticonfig, followed by sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx… it will break. To me it seems that the modifications that aticonfig makes to the xorg.conf file describing the monitor arrangement are not compatible with sax2 and it hangs. if you had not run sax2, and rebooted after aticonfig --initial, it would have worked fine (until you tried to run sax2 from yast, it won’t work…refuses to write to the xorg.conf file).
if you had a copy of your xorg.conf file from before upgrading somewhere to replace the current mangled one, this could be easy… copy to /etc/X11 and overwrite it… then run aticonfig --initial again from init 3.
if you don’t have a copy, then it will be more involved, you will have to manually edit xorg.conf if you have the knowledge of what you need in there. Or you can do plan b…
revert to the radeon (or radeonhd) driver which should be installed and present on your machine.
rpm -e $(rpm -qa ‘fglrx’) – remove all fglrx
then,
sax2 -r -m 0=radeon --to install radeon driver
reboot, set up your machine for desired resolution and fontsize (at least mine changes everytime) and mouse settings.
After you think you have it the way you want it, then make a copy of your xorg.conf file just in case and install your fglrx rpm as you did before, then just run aticonfig without the sax2 setup.
It works this way, although you are unable to use sax2 after this… you must use amdcccle to change display properties.
Hopefully this situation will be addressed soon, seems everyone is aware of it… if you look in the release notes/install pdf files from ATI, they specifically mention this problem.
good luck.