I am an OK Slackware user. I recently installed Debian 4.0 on a friends machine. I had thought that debian would auto detect all the H/W correctly and work smooth from the start. But it seems that in this particular comp it has failed to do so. This comp has an onboard ATI x200 Radeon Grpahics card but debian seemingly failed to configure it correctly. I dont mind low resolution and I dont really need beryl etc. but atleast it should have been able to get 1024x768 .. but it is showing only 640x480 which is just unusable.

Any tips on how to fix this?? Apart from the ATI drivers?

duryodhan

See what's in /etc/X11/xorg.conf (or XFree86, I'm not sure which one Debian uses today) and what's in X logs in /var/log/. If the config file doesn't list higher resolutions, add them there, and if it does, read the logfile why they are abandoned..that's a start.

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

make sure you are using the correct driver ( ati ) and not VGA, or VESA.

Beyond that, look to installing the proprietary ATI drivers..
http://wiki.debian.org/ATIProprietary

bouncer : I know the Slack way. But I wanted the debian way of doing it . The slack way is easy to do in Slack ... but most other distros it is horrid . They default to init 4, ctrl + alt+bckspc doesn't work etc. etc. In such places , I dont wanna be the one to twiddle with xorg.conf.

farslayer ... thanks a lot . It workd.