Video Card and Hard Drives

[Unk McThunderpants <chaos.squirrel@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I'm running Etch with kernel 2.6.18-4-686 and KDE on a Toshiba TE2100 (tecra), 
and I'm having some issues with my video card.

It's an nVidia GeForce4 420 GO, which is, as far as I know, supported by the 
Legacy nvidia drivers.

I've tried the NV driver for XOrg, the proprietary nVidia drivers (legacy and 
not) from the website as well as the nvidia-glx and nvidia-glx-legacy 
packages. The non-legacy packages all don't work at all, and the legacy ones 
only give me a max resolution of 800x600. when I use the VESA driver for Xorg 
I can get 1024x768 which is, according to the spec sheet, what the screen can 
handle up to.

the problem with this is that the neither the NV or vesa drivers seem to have 
any 3D acceleration etc. (I know it's only got 16MB of VRAM... but I'm not 
trying to play oblivion here :-P )

Does anyone have any ideas as to what I can do to remedy this?

Also I was wondering if there are any compatibility issues with using USB Hard 
drives that anyone knows of, or are they all fine? I'm assuming that they 
just show up as Mass Storage Devices or something, but before I go out and 
spend $150 on one, I thought I might just ask...

thanks a lot in advance

Nik

p.s. In case it helps, here's some outputs...


$ lspci -v 
[...]
 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 420 Go] 
(rev a3) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
        Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Unknown device 0001
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10
        Memory at fd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
        Memory at dc000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=64M]
        Memory at dbf80000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=512K]
        [virtual] Expansion ROM at dbf00000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [44] AGP version 2.0
[...]

$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf
[....]
Section "Module"
        Load    "bitmap"
        Load    "ddc"
        Load    "dri"
        Load    "extmod"
        Load    "freetype"
        Load    "glx"
        Load    "int10"
        Load    "vbe"
EndSection
[...]
Section "Device"
        Identifier      "GeForce 420 Go"
        Driver          "vesa"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
        Option          "UseFBDev"              "true"
EndSection
[...]
Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Device          "GeForce 420 Go"
        Monitor         "Generic Monitor"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           1
                Modes           "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           4
                Modes           "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           8
                Modes           "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           15
                Modes           "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           16
                Modes           "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24
                Modes           "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
EndSection
[...]

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