help with X screen

[shaggyman87]

Hey,
I'm very new to linux. I've installed Sarge on my laptop its a gateway mx8530. I've been able to figure out most things on my own, but I don't know how I would describe this problems, and makes it hard to search on the internet.

I was having trouble with xserver. My laptop uses ATI Radeon X700, and when I put ati under driver, and do startx, I got an error that said device not found. So I changed it to vga and reduced the color depth. Now startx loads but my window is very small. When I open things like xterm or mozilla they're off the screen. Can anyone offer me any help?

I've tried xf86config, but that configures XF86Config file. I think I've configure that one correctly, but I don't know.

I want to fix this problem with vga so I can use the desktop, but it would also be nice to use the ATI driver. Also I know it would be helpful to include my XF86Config-4 file and XF86.0.log file, but I'm not sure how to copy and paste them here, because I can't really open up mozilla to use the internet.

Any help would be greatly appreciated thanks.

Also I don't know if this may make of difference of not, but my laptop would not load initially because it had an hw_random error. To get around this I had to umount hotplug and discover. I don't know if that is playing a factor here.

[Vergil83]

I would actually recommend upgrading to etch. It will be the new stable (within the next month) and they are doing the last few bug fixes, so it is quite stable. It has the new xorg, so it will most likely work with your card better (don't know for sure). To do this, edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and change all the stable to testing. Then run

apt-get update

and

apt-get dist-upgrade

. This will download and install tons of updated packages (hunderds of mb). Reboot and cross your fingers.

[soccercisco]

hi,

Assuming is a video card driver issue:

1) Find out your keyboard and mouse configuration (for US keyboards usually pc104) and your Monitor refresh rates and try (though I read you already did), if any of the info is incorrect then the x-windows system will not boot up:

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 (or xorg instead of xfree86 depending on which libraries you use).

Select either ati or vesa drivers for the card (I don't know if you tried vesa already).

2) If this doesn't work, download the Linux drivers from ATI.com and follow antidrugue's tutorial @:
http://wizah.blogspot.com/2006/10/de...i-drivers.html

Debian is moving from xfree86 to xorg libraries, so you might wanna give the xorg package a try with the newer drivers. Though as it is said in the previous post, you're better off with Etch (which includes the xorg library).

cheers,