installing debian woody and setting up X on a Presario 721

Hi,

I posted a couple of days ago with a question
regarding configuring X under debian for a presario
721.  Thanks go to Derek, Bonz, Kevin and Juraj for
the help!  I'm happy now.  And for those of you who
may be faced with a similar task in the future...

The basic problem was I had selected the wrong xserver
driver.  I chose xserver-s3 instead of xserver-savage.
 A couple of related problems, I was using debian
potato and version 3.x of X.  You'll definitely want
to use the woody distribution and version 4.x of X.

Here are a few Presario specific details for a network
installation of Debian woody and configuration of X. 
This is not a recipe for network installation of
Debian (the recipe is basically pop in the rescue
floppy and hit return a few times, but be ready to
answer a few system specific questions...).

To do the network installation, you will need to grab
the two driver floppies in addition to the rescue and
root floppies from:
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/compact
You'll need the drivers because the NIC driver is not
included in the installation disks.

Do the usual, boot with the rescue floppy and follow
the menus.  When you get to the "install kernel and
driver modules" select floppy and ... follow the
instructions.  After the two driver floppies have
installed, the next option is "configure device driver
modules".  Here you will need to configure "net" and
choose the 8139too driver for the realtek-8139 NIC
that comes with the Presario.  After installing that
it kicks you into "configure the network" where you
will need to answer the usual networking questions. 
Then you should be ready to "install the base system"
from the network.  That's it as far as installation
goes.

At this point, reboot with the boot floppy which I'm
sure you made at the end of the installation and
answer the configuration questions.  I'm pretty sure
you need to keep pcmcia support even though the
default is not to.  (Let me know if I'm wrong about
that.  The Presario has a PC card slot, so I assume if
I want to use it I need to have pcmcia support...)

For apt, I selected non-free, non-us and contrib.  I
also chose "select another apt source" and then the
edit by hand option.  I changed stable to unstable
everywhere.  If you choose not to do this, you will
have different versions of some of the packages and
the configuration stuff below may not apply.  (btw,
the editor is a little funky here.  Changing stable to
unstable caused a couple of the lines to wrap. 
Instead of just wrapping the lines, the editor
actually inserted a newline! This screwed things up
and I had to go back and do it again.  If this happens
to you, insert a blank space at the end of the
truncated line and then backspace its tail, which is
on the next line, back over the newline.)

I said NO to tasksel and then YES to dselect.  I just
wanted to grab X and my window manager.  In dselect, I
got xdm, fvwm and everything on which it depends. 
This is going to grab X for you.  Or, you can probably
just grab xlibs directly.  xlibs suggests
xserver-xfree86...GET IT.  I grabbed a few other
suggested packages (xbase-clients, xfonts-100dpi,
sfonts-base, xterm, xutils).

For package configuration, I said only bother me with
high priority questions.

When you get to xserver-xfree86 configuration, there
are a lot of ways to answer the questions.  I'll just
put down my answers because it worked.
  take savage for the driver  (this is a must)
  yes to kernel framebuffer device interface
           (savage chip supports frame buffers)
  /dev/psaux mouse port and PS/2 mouse
  LCD monitor
  1024x768 @ 60 Hz

After the configuration was finished and all the boot
stuff was set up (won't go into that, mine is dual
boot with xp), reboot.

Ok, at this point, X was ALMOST working.  My colors
were off, the resolution was poor, and the pointing
device was not aligned correctly (it actually appeared
above and to the left of the item it was selecting). 
Rebooting again fixed the colors, go figure.  For the
rest, I checked into /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and found
that the default color depth was 24 bits and that at
24 bits the resolution was set to 800x600.  Why does X
configuration ask the monitor resolution if it is just
going to ignore the answer?  Good question.  Change
the mode there to "1024x768".  That is the only mode
you need.  24 bit color should be the default.  I just
deleted the others.  That solved the problem. 
Everything worked fine.  Just for good measure, I
changed the refresh and sync rates as well.

I've included the configuration file I'm using.

Damon


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