Black screen in Dell Inspiron 700m under 640x480 resolution

[Dario Oliva]

I was booting up a Dell Inspiron 700m laptop with a bootable CD that
I have. The CD boots into X-window and tries to use 640x480 resolution.
With this laptop, I got a black screen. After hitting ctr-alt-backspace 
to kill
the X-server, I looked inside the log file and found no listed errors.

The graphics chipset on the board is an Intel 82852/82855.

The reason I am trying to use 640x480 is because that is the resolution 
I use
at boot time to run bootsplash. If I use a different resolution when X 
comes up,
there is a period of about 2-3 seconds when the screen flickers and gets 
some
weird lines across. That is why I am trying to use the same resolution 
throughout.

Any suggestions on where to go from here?

Dario Oliva