I am running Debian version 3.1, kernel 2.6.9. The main challenge has been to get the CRT display to work properly, since I use it every day. The problem is a display offset, where the bottom centimeter or so is cut off, and a same-sized band of noise was at the top. I have spent many hours trying to solve this problem, and can get around it when necessary, but for now am just living with it on a day-to-day basis.
I was completely perplexed by the fact that Müller and I both had this offset problem, whereas Brett (http://dynevor.hopto.org/linuxiste/x40_install.html) did not, despite having identical hardware and our XFree86.0.log files reporting the same XFree86 versions. David Dawes, author of the i810 driver, finally shed light on the problem with his observation:
``To complicate matters, the distros make various changes to what they release, so what Mandrake calls 4.3.0.1 and what Debian calls 4.3.0.1 are likely quite different. I can only help with XFree86 versions as released by XFree86 since the others are an unknown quantity to me, and my suggestion (as it should have been in the first place) is to try the latest available XFree86 first and see if that shows the same problem.''
I have tried all the stable and latest CVS versions of XFree86, as well as X.org, with no improvement. Brett reports that he now gets the problem with Mandrake 10.1. It looks like there was some intermediate version of XFree86 which was working, but subsequently became broken without it being noticed.
There are two partial solutions to the problem. Müller describes the X.org dual monitor support solution. For me this is okay for doing presentations, but for the daily task of coming to work and switching to an external monitor it's no good, because the second monitor is not simply a clone of the LCD, where all my applications are already running. A simpler solution is to restart X while the output to the external monitor is on. It comes back without the offset--though the offset will now be on your LCD when you switch back! To avoid having to restart X at the beginning of the day, since I already have applications running, I just try to ignore the band of noise, which luckily isn't too thick.