Okay, I decided to install Debian Lenny as an experiment, on my old 3 gigs HD. Before the 80 gigs one. Also the whole system is from 98, except the sound card.

I used graphics install and guided partitioning, and opted for use entire disk and made a home partition, but installing software then did not work, even when I tried it with Etch, and the compact disk had no errors.

So I tried again with guided partitioning and the simpler partition. It worked. Maybe there was too little space.

I tried a few times as well, and in some attempts it would not install Grub or Lilo.

Desktop version.

However on first boot up, without the CD, I get

"Failed to start X Server (your graphical interface) It is likely it is not set up correctly. Would you like to view the X server output to diagnose the problem"

After "yes",

Lots of writing and disclaimer, bugs report. Fatal server error: no screens found.

Following the instruction in the similar thread, "lspci" I got descriptions and one was "01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: s3 Inc 86c386 [Trio3D/2X] (rev 01)"

Then is the same command line which took lspci.

You'll need to reconfigure the X-server:Make sure the appropriate driver for the videochip is available.