X and Fluxbox :: Fuzzy band in X running on an ancient laptop

At the risk of being burned alive for cross-posting, here goes. I also posted this message in the Laptops forum since it could go either way.

I installed DSL 3.4.7 on an old Thinkpad 560 and am trying to get X to work correctly. The laptop is a 2640-10U with a Trident Cyber9382 chipset and a 11.3" DSTN display. After lots of head-beating, I discovered that the only thing would work was XF86_VGA. I downloaded a binary (I think version 3.x), found some XF86Config settings that mostly worked and was able to
get a desktop to appear at 800x600x16.

The problem now is that there is a strange band that is about an inch tall and screen width at the bottom that is fuzzed out. All other parts of the screen appear to be OK. I took a (bad) picture of it and you can see it here:

http://i187.photobucket.com/albums....een.jpg

I know that the hardware is working fine since this laptop was running Win95 at this resolution with no display problems.

So...what could be the problem? Is this something fixable in XF86Config settings? Is there another XF86_SVGA binary that I can download to try? Honestly, I went to so many different websites I can't remember where I downloaded the one I'm using.

Also, fwiw, I tried Xvesa and the fb server with no luck. I tried all the different combinations of VGA=xxx cheatcodes at boot and none of them worked on my hardware so fb was out. Xvesa would only work in 640x480x4 even though my display is capable of 800x600x16. I tried every other combination and got a screen full of multicolored bands.

did you try the trident server ?

Or the xorg extension?

I'll try these suggestions. I searched the forum for "trident" and found a link to an Xtrident binary so I supposed I'll give that a try. I'll have a look at Xorg as well.

It's frustrating that XF86_SVGA specifically supports the Trident Cyber9382 but something along the way is not working right. It's almost usable as long as I work in the upper 70% of the screen.

Any other suggestions are welcome. I've tried tweaking my modelines in XF86Config running XF86_SVGA but it doesn't seem to have much effect. Even after RTFM at xfree86.org that describes all the modeline numbers, it's still a mystery to me. I'm particularly confused about the first number -- the clock. Several example XF86Config files claiming to work on the Thinkpad 560 have different values which don't work for me. How do I determine a list of valid clocks to use for my hardware?

Xfree's or Xorg's autodetection (ie "X -probeonly")

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