This solution is for future people having trouble with the Intel 82845G integrated chip and PCLinuxOS 2009. It has become obvious that there are inherent problems with the Intel i810 driver .... both old and new. Let me describe for you what I did to resolve the issue partly.
My system is a Dell GX260 running the onboard Intel 82845G running 1GB of RAM. In booting to both the PCLinuxOS 2009.2 KDE and Gnome versions, I ran into the similar issues that have been posted on this topic. I was able to install in a 640x480 mode when I booted to the live CD in Vesa mode. Once installed and upon rebooting the system, it locked up once again and I was back to square one, as some of you also experienced. Now comes the more interesting part. As I was fooling around with booting into failsafe mode, which puts you at the console in single root user mode, I typed "XFdrake" and changed to the older i810 driver. This did not solve the issue and still gave me screen lockup on a normal boot.
The solution I found was to go ahead and boot to failsafe and relaunch XFdrake. Go ahead and use the older i810 driver but this time select "options" before you quit. Disable 3D acceleration as well as translucency. Once disabled you will find the "test" works fine and you can quit. Reboot and you will find you can run your onboard video system just fine in PCLinux0S 2009. You will not have accelerated video however and may find the graphics functions to work slow.
The better solution is to find a nice Nvidia FX5500 AGP or PCI card.
PCLinuxOS works wonderfully with these and are relatively easy to find on eBay for approx. $40.00. This is an inexpensive solution to getting a older system working with accelerated graphics!
Tom
