I have a new athlon machine bearing onboard video of the S3 ProSavage 
variety. The 40g drive is evenly split between installs of Debian Linux 
and NetBSD stable, albeit the latter now sports a -current kernel. (The 
current kernel configured the onboard audio, whereas the install 
'stable' kernel did not...)

The linux install (X ver. 4.2.1.1) did not configure the onboard video
until I grabbed a savage_drv.o file from
http://www.probo.com/timr/savage40.html. Works famously now. I did not 
have similar success with the NetBSD savage_drv.o from that same 
website. Here's a snippet from dmesg:

NetBSD 1.6U (GENERIC) #0: Fri Jul 25 03:45:54 UTC 2003
	wingnut@nbsdtroll:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
[snip]

pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1
pci0: i/o space, memory space enabled, rd/line, rd/mult, wr/inv ok
pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0
pchb0: VIA Technologies product 0x3116 (rev. 0x00)
agp0 at pchb0: aperture at 0xd0000000, size 0x10000000
ppb0 at pci0 dev 1 function 0: VIA Technologies VT8633 (Apollo Pro 266) CPU-AGP Bridge (rev. 0x00)
pci1 at ppb0 bus 1
pci1: i/o space, memory space enabled
vga1 at pci1 dev 0 function 0: S3 product 0x8d04 (rev. 0x00)
wsdisplay0 at vga1 kbdmux 1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation)
wsmux1: connecting to wsdisplay0

I believe that 'vga1' is the onboard video (the linux kernel detects the
same product number: 0x8d04). But looking at the above, it seems that
vga1 is handling wscons. Is this why it is not available for X? The
error message from X, after trying startx, is "(EE) No devices
detected." 

So, is there some kernel tweaking that will fix this?

Best,
-- 
Bob Bernstein