On an HP Pavilion a600Y (sold in 2004), booting Kanotix flavor of Knoppix, rebooted with disk in place:

Screen #1 comes up, but no response from mouse to change to English

Therefore no screen #2

Then screen #3 came up with no action by me, followed by lots and lots of code

final three lines:

Retrying with Server Xorg (vesa) .
Retrying with Server Xorg (fbdev) .

Error: No suitable X.Server found for your card.

These boxes shipped with an "on-board" graphics card, which is the set-up in question here. How come even the basic VESA won't work with it?

I guess the vendor of this graphics card may not have released specs for it. In that case, is there a way to experimentally find a way to get X to work with it? If the specs are out, how to use them to get X to work?