Well, once again, I made things harder for myself than they needed to be.
Since this notebook is for a Linux newbie, I didn't really want to get into
the more-sophisticated Debian capabilities anyway. :-) (Although I did learn
some useful stuff about apt-get.) I found some old Mandrake 7.2 install
disks and they worked fine. I had totally expected that X wouldn't work in
the older distro because this is a very new system. Either I made some
mistake in my selections, or the Debian auto-configuration was not sensing
the display correctly. In any case, the thing's configured. Thanks anyway
to Hans and Nathan for their replies.
(text/plain)