Using XFree 4.3 to make your video card work on Debian (woody)
One way to get your video card to work in Debian (woody) is to try with Knoppix or some other magic autoconfiguration tool and see if it is recognized. Use lsmod to take note of the kernel modules used and also make a copy of the XF86Config-4 file it uses (which you can find with find /etc -name 'XF86Config*'). Taking a note of the output of lspci to see what hardware was recognized might be useful.
Distributions linke Knoppix tend to use the VGA framebuffer, which might not use all the capabilites of your video card.
To configure yourself:
Add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://www.backports.org/debian stable kernel-image-2.4.26-i386 deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/xfree86 woody main
Use apt-get or aptitude to upgrade your XFree86 server and your kernel. Restart your machine (with reboot, for example) to boot your new kernel. Debian will show you a list of available servers to use.
Use modconf to make sure that all the modules required (the output from lsmod in Knoppix) are loaded. For example, if you have some board with video-chip-intel, you'll need to add the modules agp and either i830 or i810. Once you've done this, try to start X.
If that didn't work, try to copy the XF86Config-4 you got from Knoppix and use it in your new Debian installation.
Last update: 2007-07-05 (Rev 12047)