x troubles on hp omnibook 4100

[Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca>]

hello laptopers,

finally inherited an old laptop (hp omnibook 4100, with a pII-266 I
think, and some other hardware to be discussed later on).  Installed
base woody system with the old Lordsutch netinst mini-cd, then
upgraded to testing plus a tiny bit of unstable (blackdown) and one
non-debian package (OpenOffice 1.1rc3).  Just about everything seems
to be running smoothly (well haven't set up apm yet, but haven't tried
either), with one minor but pretty irritating exception, namely:

I can't get xfree86 to display properly.  The laptop uses a NeoMagic
video controller (MagicGraph 128XD, NM2160 according to lspci), but
when I choose the neomagic driver in 'dpkg-reconfigure
xserver-xfree86', characters are horribly distorted.  On the other
hand, if I use the VESA driver, I get pretty clear display, but only
on a small fraction of the screen.  Contrary to what I expected from
some archived posts from this list, this doesn't seem to change when I
mess withthe monitor resolution in the config file or using
dpkg-reconfigure.  That is, I'd seen suggestions that other people
having similar problems had caused those problems by setting the wrong
monitor size.  I tried about every possible combination with each of the
two drivers, and in neither case could I solve the problem.

Am I missing something?  Any hints from people who use NeoMagic video
cards or similar omnibooks?  Or from anyone else?

Thanks as usual for theh elp!

Matt