According to a post by Alex Deucher, the canonical way to build the ATI driver with TV Out support that he maintains is:
First make sure you back up the existing radeon (radeon_drv.so) and ati (ati_drv.so) drivers.
install the xorg-dev, mesa-dev, libdrm-dev and xserver-dev packages for your distro. The usual build tools are needed too (autoconf, automake, libtool, gcc and others)
git-clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati
cd xf86-video-ati
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install or make install as root
If you get this error after running autogen.sh, you forgot to install libtool:
configure.ac:38: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_DISABLE_STATIC
If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow.
See the Autoconf documentation.
configure.ac:39: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_PROG_LIBTOOL
autoreconf: /usr/bin/autoconf failed with exit status: 1

