X server for crappy Packard Hell machine

[Stuart Ballard <sballard@netreach.net>]

Hi,

I have installed debian slink on an old Packard Hell computer. Most
things work fine, but the standard XF86_SVGA xserver appears to have
some problems - it works, sort of, but once the screen gets busy I get
random pixels going the wrong color. It appears as if video memory is
sometimes getting randomly corrupted. If I was running windows, I would
suspect a bad video driver - but I'm not running a video driver.

I am sure that this is a case of crappy hardware, but I also know that
windows managed to work around it somehow, so it can be done.

Since the only documentation I have on the hardware is a sticker on the
box which says "1Mb video memory upgradable to 2Mb", I configured X by
accepting all the defaults I could find, and probing for anything it
would let me probe for. This, of course, is probably what went wrong.

Does anyone have any tips on how I can figure out how X *should* have
been configured, or whether it would have been possible to use one of
the accelerated servers instead of the basic one?

Thanks a million,
Stuart.