Heya....
i have a DELL latitude notebook which uses a ATI Mobility radeon Graphics card and it is running debian (unstable) with the stock kernel-2.6.7
Firstly on your pc check if you have the module for the graphics loaded. in bash (the command line) type "lsmod" and you should get something like this:
Quote:
Module Size Used by Tainted: P
usb-storage 97120 1
pcmcia_core 41376 0 [airo_cs ds i82365]
cpuid 1184 0 (unused)
radeonfb 17728 0 (unused)
i810_audio 21248 0
ac97_codec 9568 0 [i810_audio]
soundcore 3204 2 [i810_audio]
orinoco 29568 0 (unused)
hermes 3296 0 [orinoco]
3c59x 24616 1
input 3040 0 [keybdev]
usb-uhci 20676 0 (unused)
usbcore 48000 1 [usb-storage printer usb-uhci]
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what you get is not really important, the only real important thing is too see if you have the "radeonfb" module listed (you can see mine in the quote above)
if you havent got it type "modprobe radeonfb" and then configure xserver to use the vesa driver and framebuffer support. then try to start your GUI, hopefully it will work
if it works then add "radeonfb" to your /etc/modules file so that its loaded automatically everytime you turn on the pc. if it doesnt have a fiddle with the Xservers config file (a "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" worked for me)
before i did the above i would have problems ranging from low colour and resolution to it not wanting to start at all/garbled (sometimes white) screen. afterwards it worked and since then ive had no problems. hopefully this will help you too.
P.S: Welcome to linuix! :-)
P.P.S: Oh yeah, if you still have trouble with your laptop a great site to look at is
http://www.linux-laptop.net/. here you can find howto's and documentation for installing linux on all sorts of laptops (helped me loads of times)
Good luck!