Absolutely positively am fed completely up with the Bill hater bugs and such so switched.Just installed Debian and need a little help on how to get that rage card to work. All I'm getting is garbage at the moment and I'm still new to this!!!!

Welcome, Rogshoggy!

The answers are in the /var/log/Xorg.0.log, you can install wgetpaste and give us the link.

Thank you, I'll see if I can get somewhere with that, I'm actually a new/old user as I ran debian about 10 yrs ago. life went where it went and I was pcless until recently and more or less fell by the wayside with the knowledge base so am having to relearn ALOT!

oh and the sys is a Dell optiplex gx400 512ram 20 and 40 gig hdd if that helps from my end in trying to get up and runnin again thanks.

ok this is drivin me batsnot. I CANNOT seem to get that rage card to install. have added the non-free line to "sources.list" and when i do an apt-get update it keeps tellin me it can't resolve!!! any ideas?!?!?!!!have the deb for it on a usb but as new as i am i still can't figure out how to install from there as of yet HELP!!!!! rookie extraordinaire!!!!!

Slow down now. One issue at the time.
First, I do not run Debian currently, but I do not think non-free is needed for Radeon FOSS driver.
Second, if you get IP resolving errors then your network is not set up properly.

So lets start from beginning. Is your network up? Can you connect to the internet? What's the output of
Are you connecting wired or wireless.

ok I'm running 2 diff hdd's in this old beastie it'a a Dell optiplex gx 400 512 ram 1.5 ghz pentium 4 oh and to confuse myself further it's 2 20 gig maxtor's and a 40 gig maxtor, so i've got win xp homie on the first 20 and debian 6.0.5 "Squeeze" on the other 20 and the 40 is for a dump it here. What I'm doing as complicated as I made it tis to boot to the 20 gig debian drive after i've done a bit of research off the other 20 in winxp, and see if all the advice I've been given works .. or not. have reinstalled it twice now after supposed bug fixes and assorted crashes. Thought i knew how to jump right back on the horse weeeelllllll...... appears I was mistookin as my grandaughter says!

So I'm back to grunt stupid again apparently and have requalled as a rookie again!

Have you installed firmware-linux & firmware-linux-free. Also is your network wired or wireless?