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.

Vaughn Treude