Im a total linux noob and have been messing around with Mandriva '06 and Debian on a laptop (averatec 4200) with i915GM chipset, Pentium M, etc...but am sticking with Mandriva as I like the interface, though I'm have serious problems with graphics in X.

...Ive read lots about driver problems with the i915GM driver...but none of those threads were able to help. Vesa driver works fine, but won't run at 1280x800 (screen is shrunk and colored lines appear on the screen). Even worse, the i915 driver displays with graphics errors--windows overlaying on top of eachother as if invisible--and I cannot see the mouse pointer. Also the i915 setting (w/ i810 driver) doesnt size the desktop correctly but I think a fix for that is in 915resolution.

Is there some kind of misconfiguration that could/would cause this? As for xorg.conf, I have pretty much left it to the settings created by the drake x11 driver config proggie. Do I need to turn on some additional options or change some configurations?

Thanks for all the help...

You might want to look at 855resolution. It's software to change the resolution of an available vbios mode for the 855 / 865 / 915 Intel graphic chipset.

915resolution does a good job of fixing my screen resolution problems to fit the screen, but the graphics errors remain--no visible mouse pointer and areas of the screen that dont get redrawn when windows open and close. vesa works just fine, but it'd be nice to have some hardware acceleration, especially for movies, etc.

Thanks for all the help!

UPDATE: Some of my searching came up with this thread... http://archive.nnytech.net/sgroup/xf86/1600/1/ With Option "NoAccel" "true" I was able to get a normal looking desktop without any of the hideous graphical artifacts. And my mouse pointer came back when I used Option "SWCursor" "true"

surprising to me because I'm using Mandriva 2006 (2.6.12mdk kernel) with driver snapshots dated yesterday and the latest Xorg binaries available.

Hardware acceleration would be a great thing to have though...I would hate to have to boot winblows every time I want to watch a DVD.

The error seems to be associated with massive repeats of the following line in my Xorg.0.log file...
"ADVANCE_LP_RING: outring (0xXXXX) isn't on a QWord boundary", where the XXXX is a hex number

I think also there is a problem with allocating the memory for graphics--DRI seems to be disabled and my frame buffer size is locked in at 4096...contrary to the 32768 I gave it xorg.conf...I dont know why that is.