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OpenSuSE and ATI Drivers

I had a user need a new desktop installed with OpenSuSE 11.2 and get his ATI FirePro 2260 video card.

I am not a fan of SuSE, don’t use it. Too many oddities. For example:
admin@Sodium:~> ifconfig
Absolute path to 'ifconfig' is '/sbin/ifconfig', so running it may require superuser privileges (eg. root).

A command like ifconfig should always be in the regular PATH. I could fix it, but I shouldn’t have to.
Also:

admin@Sodium:~> sudo -s
We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.
#3) With great power comes great responsibility.

root's password:

What good is sudo if its going to ask for root’s password? Defeats the purpose of sudo. I am sure there may be a good reason. But not good enough.

But on to the original reason for this post. The proprietary river from ATI (currently distributed as FirePro_8.702_Linux_96418.zip) is broken. Running the installer script detects the OS and stuff but fails with a glibc error: double free or corruption or something similar. Turns out the script isn’t smart enough to know gcc, make or the kernel headers aren’t installed. Hey ATI! Try a simple trick: try the which command! Once those are installed with

zypper install make gcc

and all is good. (May need the headers and source, but I believe headers are installed by default.)