The installation programs detected radeon RV100 QY (radeon 7000/ve) on this machine although the specs from the dell site is saying that radeon 7000-m is on it. I failed to get X to run on this configuration using all the possible methods I could find. I tried official ATI fglrx drivers (from a debian package made by someone), I tried standard radeon drivers, vesa, vga and anything else I could see in any sample XF86Config. It just wont switch to graphics mode. I always get the dreaded "IO error 104". I am realy out of my resources here. Any help will be enormously appreciated.

Have you checked the Dell support forums There are a few threads relating to X on poweredge

http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/

August 2002, and march 2004

I searched them with google (e.g. site:lists.dell.com x-window or xf86config) but nothing came up. I just took a look at the bios and i saw that bios is detecting 16MB SDRAM on the video card. It means that the installed video card is in fact radeon 7000-m, as the dell spec sheet declares and not as some of the linux autodetection tools declared it to be radeon 7000/ve. I believe there is not much difference between installing X on dell and any other machine. Only major difference I can see is that the processors are 64 bit. I was wondering if some kernel stuff is maybee needed to get this basic vga working?