I am a newbie, so please be patient.

I just bought a Dell Inspiron 5160 laptop with WinXP HE preinstalled. The system is :

- Mobile Pentium® 4 Processor 518 w/HT Technology (2.80GHz, 533MHz FSB)
- 15 inch XGA LCD Panel
- 1G RAM
- Video card: 32MB DDR XGI® Volari™ XP5 AGP 4X Graphics
- BIOS: A5 (This is the latest that dell has for this model).

I used Partition Magic to resize the and repartition the 80G drive and installed
Fedora Core 2.

I had problems from the get go: during installation the video was all smudged
and shadowy with a lot of black pixels so I couldn't even read most of the installation
screens.
So I went to text installtion and installed successfully and system boots but
with text only. No GUI.
After a lot of struggle and hand editing my "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" file I got
the GUI to come up but still it's very smudgy and impossible to view
like you can read the very large size font with diffucutly and you can
see X-ray like shadows of the icons and images. Cleary this is not what I was
hoping for for my investment.

I tried to go to the XGI website xgitech for linux drivers but they point
you to the Dell website, which by the way has no information whatsoever about
the systtem, I mean technical stuff like appropriate Vsync and Hsync rates, etc.

So my Questions are:

1) Has any one successfully installed FC2 on Inspiron 5160 with GUI? and if
so please post how you resolved the LCD problem?

2) If Not , can I install another flavor of linux that is known to work on this system?
and which one?

3) If non of the above, does this mean it's money down the drain and I won't be
able to use linux on my laptop ever, or what should I do to to achieve that.?

Below are portions of my xorg.conf (that I thought maybe relevent) if it helps:

I really appreciate any help. ThanX in advance.

Leopard____.


>>>>>>>>
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
# ModelName "CPD-E200"
DisplaySize 330 240
HorizSync 30.0 - 60.0
VertRefresh 48.0 - 60.0
Option "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "vesa"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "VESA VBE 2.0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection
<<<<<<<<<<<<

I have Fedora Core 1 running on an inspiron 5160 with xgi. I got the xgi drivers, compiled them and installed them, but they did not work. I then realised that they are not necessary. The default "vesa" driver works!

When I start X (using startx) I get a screen with horrible 4 colors. I then hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 which switches to a console window and then hit Ctrl-Alt-F7 to get back to the X window. Then the screen is set right. I have an SXGA+ so I get 1400x1050 max resolution as well.

I also use this laptop, and have the same issues. A 'refresh' or session restart sometimes does the trick. Have either of you found another solution yet?

rwankar, could you please post your xorg.conffile?

Linspire's Live CD does the same thing, and can be made to work correctly by switching to 8 bit 1024x768 and doing an Xwindow referesh (or Quick Restart). The boot sequence is not shown, so I cannot tell what driver is being used.

With this knowledge, I began an install of Debian, as it is the core of Linspire.

Upon informing XGI how uncooperative Dell can be, I got this reply:

-----
Dear John,
I am so sorry about that. If you really need one, you may want to try V3 Linux driver: http://www.xgitech.com/sd/sd_download.asp I strongly suggest you to back up all file before you install it. And we are not responsible any system compatibility and performance.
Best Regards
XGI Technology Inc.
------

So what-the-heck, I'll try it....once I figure out how.