dont know if this can help, but I had the same problems with a i810, and
after a week struggling like you, I found that inserting Option "NoDDC"
just makes everything work...

but maybe i830 is totally different anyway...

Germano

On Mon, 2002-11-04 at 05:19, Duncan McEwan wrote:
> Last week I posted to this list describing problems I was having getting
> XFree86 4.2.1 running on a Dell C400 laptop which has the i830M graphics
> chip.  This message is a summary of what I've learnt since then, and a
> request for pointers to where to go next.
> 
> Thanks to Nicholas Joly, Matthias Drochner, Herb Peyerl and Shoichi Tomii for
> their suggestions so far.
> 
> Firstly, the unresolved symbols I was seeing were fixed by specifying that the
> server should load the "xaa" and "ddc" modules.
> 
> The failure to open /dev/agpgart was explained as being due to NetBSD not yet
> properly supporting the i830M.  Nicholas sent me some kernel patches which he
> described as "some preliminary work for a new i830 agp driver".  With a
> kernel incorporating those patches dmesg now shows
>   ...
>   agp0 at pchb0: aperture at 0xe0000000, size 0x8000000
>   vga1 at pci0 dev 2 function 0: Intel 82830MP Integrated Video (rev. 0x03)
>   ...
> 
> And rather than telling me "/dev/agpgart (Device not configured)", the X
> server now says:
> 
>   ...
>   (--) I810(0): Chipset: "i830"
>   (--) I810(0): Linear framebuffer at 0xE0000000
>   (--) I810(0): IO registers at addr 0xF4F80000
>   (II) I810(0): detected 1024K stolen memory.
>   (II) I810(0): I810CheckAvailableMemory: 208896k available
>   (==) I810(0): Will alloc AGP framebuffer: 8192 kByte
>   ...
> 
> which looks promising.  But it still crashes after loading the VBE module.
> 
>   ...
>   (II) Loading sub module "vbe"
>   (II) LoadModule: "vbe"
>   (II) Loading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/libvbe.a
>   (II) Module vbe: vendor="The XFree86 Project"
> 	  compiled for 4.2.1, module version = 1.0.0
> 	  ABI class: XFree86 Video Driver, version 0.5
> 
>   Fatal server error:
>   Caught signal 11.  Server aborting
>   ...
> 
> Matthias told me
> 
> > VBE did almost never work for me in XF86. On i810, it modified the card state
> > behind X's back. (I placed a comment in agp_i810 about a workaround in a
> > fatal situation.)
> >        Option  "NoVBE"
> > avoids these problems.
> 
> But when I tried 'Option "NoVBE"' (in the Device section for the i810) X still
> attempted to load the vbe module and I got the same crash...
> 
> I'd appreciate it if someone could explain what VBE is and why XFree86 insists
> on loading it even when I've told it not to!  Also whether it is likely to
> be the cause of the seg fault that is killing my X server and if there is
> anyway of stopping it from being loaded.
> 
> Finally Shoichi Tomii noted that you can in fact get XFree86 working on this
> hardware, albeit only with 8-bit colour if you specify the driver as "vesa".
> This does indeed work, so at least I have a limited form of X running on this
> laptop.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Duncan