I'm running an Athlon 1700 machine that has an S3 Savage KM266 chipset. Now I know that the Savage support in Linux is notoriously poor, but I'm a bit off-put by the erratic behavior of the driver included in the Knoppix distro.

I was able to boot Knoppix 3.3 just fine, and used it to perform a Debian install to my hard drive. Both were working fine. Then in what I hope was an unrelated incident, the Apple monitor I had been using died (my main computer is a Mac, and I switch between them via KVM). I hooked up a Dell monitor (which probes as DEL550) and the hard drive install would then freeze upon my attempts to configure the monitor in the KDE Control Center. (This is to be expected I suppose, since it's a different monitor and all.)

What is MOST mysterious is that now the Knoppix CD doesn't play nice with the display; with the Apple one it would blink a few times before settling on a configuration (usually at a lower vert. refresh than I would like, but "eh") but now I just get a bad signal (out of sync) but the pretty lady just goes on intiating her startup sequence.

The only cheat code that seems to make a difference is forcing the machine to use the vesa driver, but the resulting HD install can't start X at all.... it says no screens found. I've monkeyed around with the XFree86Config-4 file a good bit, and tried the most recent savage drivers I could on the web, but to no avail.

Anybody have any similar kind of experience?