Hello:

I have been working with my Dell Optiplex GX1p which has the following configuration:

P3 500 mhz
447 MB RAM
60 GB Hard Drive
DVD RW DL (Samsung) Optical Drive
USB 2.0 expansion card
IEEE 1394 expansion card
Crystal Semiconductor CS4236 soundcard (integrated)
ATI Rage 128 8 MB video (integrated)

Added Video Diamond Stealth 2000 PCI 8 MB (this is mainly for OpenGL support)

The problem, and for those of you who guessed this, is that the Dell doesn't have a way to physically disable the onboard video and the machine "turns off" the integrated card when another is one is put into the PCI bus (as is here).

Linux sees this as a "dual head" system and I obviously don't know enough about configuring XFree86 to get the system to use the Diamond board over the integrated board... in fact, I want it to ignore the integrated video. Hopefully, I have a new video board on the way that is much better than the diamond, so I will need to configure the xserver again at that time.

HOWEVER, I want to get the system up and running with this board.

I have tried a DMESG to figure out where the system "thinks" the board is and the configuration wants something like PCI:0:16:0 (which does not work).

The Diamond card is physically installed in slot 4 , if you count the integrated video, it would be 5, so it goes like this:

0 = onboard video (or an empty slot)
1 = empty slot (or USB expansion card)
2 = USB expansion card (or IEEE 1394)
3 = IEEE 1394 (or Diamond Stealth)
4= Diamond Stealth 2000 PCI card (or empty slot)

This all depends again on if the integrated video is considered by the system to be a PCI device :-) Hope that above is not confusing given this parameter.

Anyhow, need to figure out HOW to get this card configured and how the slot assignment scheme works... help is VERY welcome.

Thanks,

Mike

Boy do I feel kinda stupid right now :-)

Solved this one already but decided to post the fix in case someone else runs into this :-D

My Xserver died giving me errors and the PCI ID was given in the why it died senario. I don't mind if there is another way to find these ids in the future, but it turned out that the correct ID for the video card is PCI:2:10:0 in my case.

So I did a dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 and put in the proper information and it came up fine.

I just had a similar problem in an install (new to Debian) and your kind explanation saved me a lot of time and head scratching.