agpgart, XFCom_810 and the Dell OctiPlex

[<mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu>]

Well, despite the risk of being screamed at from the prestigious:

   Center for the Study of Brain, Mind, and Behavior

at Princeton, I'd still like to gather courage and ask a question.

I helped a colleague this afternoon install 2.2r2 on his new Dell
Optiplex GX110. The installation went very smoothly indeed. I hadn't
done an install from scratch with potato, and I was really impressed.

The problem, though, is getting X working. This is a known issue, I
think. These machines seem to have Intel i810 video cards, which
are not successfully autodetected by anXious.

I've looked around on the web and found some information, but nothing
specific to Debian. If I understand correctly, these cards need a
kernel module called `agpgart' and they need the SVGA server.

But I also gather that Intel has released their own version of
agpgart.o as well as their own X server for the i810 chipset
(XFCom_810). The combination of these two is said to yield better
performance, and the instructions on the Intel web-site seem fairly
clear. 

But I thought I should check here before plunging in, to see if
anybody has experience doing this on a Debian system, or if any of you
unfailingly kind and knowledgeable people had any advice or warnings
to offer.

Thank you,

Jim McCloskey