X and Fluxbox :: Need help getting video up



I have an old Dell Latitude LM with a NeoMagic 2070 video card. DSL has EVERYTHING I want for my laptop and even works with my lame PCMCIA network card. However, it looks... well... it doesn't :P  It's all blue/green with some nasty vertical lines. Thought it was perhaps was the display so I hooked up my external monitor and got the same result. Concluded it's the video card.

Now, the big limit to the laptop is the hard disk no longer functions properly so I dare not install it to disk- it will eventually fail. So, what I'm hoping for is some drivers and a method by which I can use them. If that means messing with the ISO of the cd, that's fine as long as I have some pretty clear instructions. I'm a computer junkie, just new to linux and falling in love... Would be awsome if I could get it to work on my laptop.

I've been having a blast playing with it on my desktop, and I found out that Knoppix (yeah, burned that iso as well for my desktop) will actually boot of the DSL boot floppy (oh yeah, the dell's BIOS is too old to boot from cd) and even goes into booting and seems to pull up NeoMagic drivers, but the laptop's just not good enough to boot full blown knoppix- it hangs up somewhere after it tells me it's booting into xwindow.

So, I figure since DSL is based on knoppix (and it boots from the floppy even) that I could get the drivers off the knoppix cd and get them to the DSL iso and maybe make it work... But my lack of experience with linux as lead me here to ask for help. I'm kind of at a loss on where to go from here. I also may be totally off on my own little bunny trail with my head in the clouds, but I was trying :P

Anyone out there able to help?
What options have you tried at boot on your laptop?  Can you give some more info on exactly what sort of boot parameters have already failed?  Size, maximum resolution of display? I struggled a long time ago now to get any sort of linux onto my Digital Hinote (12.5"TFT - 800x600) - with a Neomagic 128?? video chip Vector Linux xfree icewm and xcfe were not great. Although DSL did not automatically support the chip with xvesa, the xframebuffer setting works perfectly and display is good even for video.  To get there I use "fb800x600" typed in at the live CD prompt, after that the menu asks you to choose between xvesa and xframebuffer mode - try the latter, before hunting down drivers.
yep, try framebuffer mode, it should work fine.


welcome to the forums :)
I have tried every frame buffer option available- it either yields the same result or doesn't even finish booting. Max resolution on it is listed as 800x600 at 256 colors.

I'm a tech by trade so drivers are simply a last resort. All the various options have been attempted already. It is vesa compatible and fb doesn't seem to work- it doesn't even boot on the vast majority of options. I even tried larger and smaller (640x480) display options than 800x600. Nada. It's not active matrix unfortunetly, it's Dual Scan (STN). But even with an external monitor I have the same issues, so it's not a display issue (unless DSL breaks some rules I don't know about :P ). I believe I've narrowed it down the the video card, but I'll try more options on the external and see what I come up with (I HIGHLY doubt it will yield different results).

Thanks for the welcome ico2. :)
I believe I've officially tried every listed setting with no better results :(

my driver search continues. Slightly depressing. Any assistance would be appreciated.
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