Hello, I'm having two problems with my laptop. My laptop is a acer extensa 4420 with an AMD 64 bit processor a ATI radeon xpress 1250 graphics card. After I installed lenny on the machine and booted it two problems came up.

The first problem is there is no gui. it gives the errors
(ee) VESA(0): No matching found and
(ee) Screens found, but none have a usable configuration.
a few lines down it said no screen found

after looking around in the command line and looked in lspci I found this message:
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 791f

I looked online and in these forums and found nothing. Also, I tried installing a driver but that failed.

The second problem is that it found no ethernet card. I did everthing that I did for the other problem exept try and install a driver.

The message I got under lspci in the command line was this:
02:00.0 Ethernet controller Marvell technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 436b (rev 15).

Because I'm a any help would be nice and very much apreciated. THANKS.

first lets look at your screen problem.
can you post your xorg.conf ?
you will find it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

it will be readable only for root
use sudo if it is install on your distro, other wise, su.

you can also try first an auto configure of xorg.conf
this hopefully will give you a generic configuration (not the best) but at least you could get a GUI.
i beleive the command goes as follow ( i cant test it im doing updates right now....):
#Xorg -configure
which as to be run as root and this will place a new config file in your current directory,
then you replace /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the newly created file. (backup your old one first even if it dont work)

for more information, run #man Xorg

let us know how it goes.

Use the following command to update your Device database.. This will make that 'Unknown Device' message go away and you will be able to see exactly what video card you have.

update-pciids

Alternately you can download the file manually on another machine and copy it into /usr/share/misc since your NIC isn't working yet..

Once you have done that and the devices are identified, post the output from lspci here and we can help you move forward with getting everything working.


also once that is done you can try to reconfigure X using the following command dpkg --reconfigure xserver-xorg and choose ati as the video driver.

Thanks Farslayer and Dropsig for the help even though it didn't work. Iused a lenny netinstall and got both a gui and it saw the network card. So thanks again because it would have been easier doing it you ways.

Nopthing wrong with moving to a newer version of the Distro on the first install. Lenny has a newer kernel than Etch so it can detect a lot more/newer hardware than etch can during install. In some cases Etch simply wont work and you HAVE to install using The testing version as was the cast with my netbook


Glad you got everything sorted out.