[SWLUG] Permedia 2 troubles

[Dafydd Harries]

Recently, I was graciously donated a machine (you know who you are). It
had some trouble booting to start with, but prodding components around
made it work, with the exception of an ISA NIC which melted (and made a
really bad smell and looks like it might have taken the slot with it).
It had a clean RedHat 9 install on it when I got it which I quickly
replaced with Debian unstable. The only problem is with X, which worked
under RH9.

The board is an agp Permedia 2. To be precise: "Texas Instruments
TVP4020 [Permedia 2] (rev 01)", according to lspci. I've tried various X
configurations, including ones generated by XFree86 -configure, but it
always seems to lock up. Also, I sometimes leave it alone and it won't
come out of console-blanking mode. Turning off APM console blanking
seems to fix that. I was running XFree 4.2, but upgraded to XFree 4.3 to
see if that would fix things. Sometimes the monitor goes blank and the
machine stops responding to the keyboard, sometimes the monitor seems to
think it's not getting a signal at all and turns itself off. At least
once, I managed to kill X using Control-Alt-Backspace, but the screen
stayed blank. (I know the machine was working because I typed "echo -e
'\a'" and it beeped at me.)

I can send /var/log/XFree86.0.log and the autogenerated configuration
file if you think it might help.

Google seems to have no answers. 

Any suggestions?

-- 
Dafydd