old mandrake 7.2 problem for the books

[Dave Liebman]

I have a really old computer and an old version of Mandrake that I'm slowly udating. The computer is a Dell L400c (the graphics card is onboard) and the linux is version 7.2.17. I have graphics problems. Originally I had no graphics. Then I updated XFree86 and got this:

I type
'X :1 &'
and I get a long error text that says, among other things
'make sure your kernel has agp gart support' and
'screens found but none have usable configuration'

I can type
'X -autoconfig &'
and I get a screen on <ctrl><alt>-F7 but also a message that says among other things
'make sure your kernel has agp gart support' and
'open /dev/fb0: No such device'

At this point I type
'export DISPLAY=0:1'
'xterm &'
but it doesn't work and I get a message that says
'neighbour table overflow' and
'xterm XT error: Can't open display: 0:1' but
I still have a graphics screen on <ctrl><alt>-F7 with a mouse pointer that moves, just nothing else.

I would like to be able to use the X windows system... can anybody advise me? I understand my system is really old and that could be most of my porblem. Is there somthing simple I overlooked?

[techieMoe]

I'm looking at what little I can find of the hardware specs for that computer. It seems it's a Pentium III-era computer around 400mHz, thereabouts? Any idea how much RAM it has? You could probably run DSL Linux or Puppy Linux on it. You might even be able to pull off Xubuntu, depending on how much RAM you have. Sorry to just sidestep your question, but as you said, you're more likely to be able to get a newer (if lighter-weight) distribution working on that machine.

[Dave Liebman]

I wrote this out weeks ago and I wasn't sure I would post it. Thanks. I appreciate the effort.