X detection
Hi,
I'd like to submit an idea for your consideration. I've written a simple
perl script that can detect many PCI video cards. The idea is to help
users select what X server to install. I was wondering if this is something
the boot-floppies team would be interested in integrating into the initial
setup sequence.
The script works best with i386 PCI hardware, and requires a relatively new
(2.2) kernel. Though some people have reported success with PCI-based
sparc's (with a Mach64 card) and PCI-based ppcs. The script recognizes
architecture-dependent configurations.
I realize that there is a *lot* of hardware that the script will not detect,
such as ISA/VLB type hardware, or many of sun's hardware. While I do plan to
add support for some of those, the main idea of the script is to do
"non-invasive" probing. This script will not hang your machine. We have
programs like SuperProbe that detects many isa video cards, and this script
is not a replacement for that.
I've put up deb's at http://master.debian.org/~tausq/video/. and would
welcome any comments and constructive criticisms on how this might (or might
not) work. In particular, there is a script that gets installed in the doc
directory (for now), that works like this:
tausq[21:23] /tmp% /usr/doc/xviddetect/xinst --test
The svga driver should work on your card.
Test mode, skipping scheduling of xserver-svga for installation
without the --test switch, it will schedule the package for installation
using dpkg. (e.g. echo xserver-svga | dpkg --set-selections ) To give
credit where credit is due, this was Overfiend's idea.
i've only been on this list for a couple of weeks, but i hope to be able to
help out with the boot-floppies team more in the near future.
randolph
--
Debian Developer <tausq@debian.org>
http://www.TauSq.org/
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