Newbie comments & queries

["Ian Balchin" <fables@imaginet.co.za>]

Hi,all,


I have just joined the list. I haven't been lurking here so hope 
that I am not offending you guys with my surely simple questions.


I chose Debian because of the GNU aspect,  out of sheer orneryness 
when everyone was telling me to take the easy route with Mandrake, 
Red Hat, or SuSe, and because i liked the name.  Not really 
sensible reasons I would agree! (except for the first one).


I have just installed potato as a dual boot m/c (with dos) on a 
new (for me) Cyrix120 PC.  I did several installs to get the hang 
of it and recover from errors made. I have it installed with no 
packages selected from tasksel (except the final tasksel -s), just 
the plainest setup possible (Disks as Violet 2.2 from Obsidian 
systems here). I am not that experienced with unix, am just doing 
this as a learning experience.  Eventually I want to use the 
machine for dial up and desktop applications as an alternative to 
Windows, but have not yet installed Xwindows, gnome, or dialup 
packages, so am only playing at the prompt at this stage.


Is there a FAQ to this list or can i ask away? I have scoured the 
online documentation given with the install process for an easy 
answer to my problems with no luck, so here goes.


1.  The old machine had a sound card after all.  How can I 
configure that without another reinstall?


2.  I have read some of the HOWTO files particularly the one on 
printing.  This is a file ending in .gz and I cannot get it to 
print out. Do I have to extract that particular file out of the 
eng.txt first ? If so, how?


3. I note that my selections for lp (port 0x378 & irq7) during 
initial install resulted in a failure;  even with no entry on the 
line it was also a failure. Why would that be?


5. I  see that my SiS6215 video card is listed on the Xfree86 site 
as a supported card, but it was not detected in the initial 
install. xviddetect does not now detect it properly, listing it as 
maybe a SiS 82C204 along with other possibilities.   I declined to 
write the xwin (?) config file on the last install as it would not 
detect the video card and came up with error 111 when i tried to 
write it previously. What do I do now? It detects a borrowed 
Trident TGUI9440 OK but maybe I can't keep that.


6. My PS2 mouse does not work on this machine (not in dos either, 
so maybe the port is broken) so how do I change this to a plain 
serial mouse? In XF86Setup I cannot get the serial mouse to go 
with _any_ settings either.


I would appreciate it if someone could point me in the right 
direction here. (I am now sort-of vi competent so can edit files 
OK).


Thanks

Ian

    Ian Balchin
    Grahamstown, South Africa.