A friend recently bought a high-end Dell laptop computer. The model
is the Inspiron 8000, if I recall correctly. It has a hard drive that
is about 9.5 Gb (yes, nearly 10 Gb on a laptop) and fips20.exe seemed
to have some trouble creating a second partition. We wanted to save
the Windows 98 partition so we used fips to create a second partition
then installed Debian 2.1. The partition table doesn't appear to have
the correct geometry specs and the total amount of disk space
available now is about 7.5 Gb instead of 9.5. Has anyone encountered
problems like this on large hard drives before? Any suggestions for
repairing the partition table? Is it likely that a 2.2.x kernel will
be able to probe the apparent geometry of the drive more successfully?
Another problem we encountered is in the configuration of the X
server. The version of SuperProbe and the xservers in Debian 2.1 were
not able to recognize the chip. We installed the 3.3.3.1 X11 packages
compiled for Debian 2.1 from the www.netgod.net site. That version of
SuperProbe recognized the chip and describes it as
First video: Super-VGA
Chipset: ATI 264LT Pro (Port Probed)
Memory: 8192 Kbytes
RAMDAC: ATI Mach64 integrated 15/16/24/32-bit DAC w/clock
(with 6-bit wide lookup tables (or in 6-bit mode))
(programmable for 6/8-bit wide lookup tables)
Attached graphics coprocessor:
Chipset: ATI Mach64
Memory: 8192 Kbytes
but neither the xserver-svga nor the xserver-mach64 packages seem to
want to drive it. Does anyone know if there are more recent drivers
at xfree86.org or at SuSE that will drive this video system?
