How to enable the External Occillation.

It won't go much beyond 20MHz.

I tried running an atmega1284 at 24MHz (bought the wrong crystal by mistake) and while it ran, anything that tries to use the SRAM for more than a couple of bytes causes it to crash.

If you want a faster processor, get a Due (when it comes out) or an atxmega chip (someone made a core for them i think).