I'm in charge of installing Debian on two Dell Latitude LM laptops, and am having some rather serious problems.
I'm actually installing from the Progeny Debian 1.0 CDs, which include XFree86 4.0.2. The main problem is that support for the video card (NeoMagic 2070 chipset) appears to be broken in 4.0.2; the problem manifests itself as the computer's video locking up, hard, showing nothing but a black screen. (Hitting Ctrl-Alt-Bkspc or Ctrl-Alt-F1 to drop back to a console doesn't even work.) The computer itself doesn't die because I can still ssh in. After reading through the neomagic mailing list on xfree86.org, it seems the best solution would be to install either XFree 4.1.0 or revert to 3.3.6. (4.0.3, although included in unstable, doesn't include the fix.) I'd prefer updating to 4.1.0, but am not aware of any Debian packages that exist. Does anyone know where I could find 4.1.0 .debs? I've also tried reverting to 3.3.6, (from testing) but there seems to be a bug in the configure script for xserver-svga; I get the following error: dexconf: " to correct this problem. (No actual problem is reported, by the way.) Anyone have any idea what might cause this error or what I can do to fix it and (hopefully) get a working version of X? Or, anyone here have experience getting a valid X configuration to work with 4.0.* on the NeoMagic 2070 chipset or the Latitude LM laptop? Thanks a lot. Colin McMillen
