i've got a Pine 3D Phantom XP8200 XABER 400 128MB DDR AGP8x video card. it's using the SiS301B chip. now this is a pretty decent video card. the only way i could get an x session to start was to use VESA drivers in the xf86config file. this results in graphical desktop but very very poor performance. but at least it was working. i saved this configuration and decided to try again using SiS generic support in the xf86config file. startx worked but as soon as i click a launcher in gnome the computer froze. rebooted and tried again with fluxbox, froze immediately. then again with gnome and i could use the main gnome menu just fine, but as soon as i clicked a launcher it locked up. what could be wrong? i've been looking at that winischhofer.net and have no clue where to begin. thanks in advance.

I don't know about that chipset, but I have a SiS530 chipset on my mobo, with 8MB shared video memory. In the docs I found that linux can only address the first 4MB, which causes the poor performance. Maybe it's something similar. I know SiS has some linuxdrivers for redhat (tarball). maybe these can help. I never used them, because at that time, I was a complete newbie, so I couldn't get it to work. hope this helps a little

Not very good info. SiS doesn't have Linux drivers for that cards (only Win32 ones). Ask in the http://www.xabre.com site for Linux support. See here for SiS card support in XFree86: http://www.xfree86.org/current/Status31.html#31 You see support only in the later 4.3 version (and not much guaranteed), don't even try the "sis" driver on earlier versions. If you have the 4.3 version you can check the man page for more current info. The info that "Johanovitch" provded in the above post is only valid for integrated video in old SiS chipsets.