Re: X on DELL laptop hangs

[John Stevenson <John@oa.nl>]

I have a Dell Laptop to, but I got hold of the red hat package
for the Neomagic X server and installed it using Alien.

Works like a dream, I get 1028 by 756 (or whatever).  It never
has crashed yet, even though I give it some grief...

I picked up the package from the followig site (but it is
available in Debian Unstable):

http://www.precisioninsight.com/products.html

John Stevenson

"David S. Zelinsky" wrote:
> 
> A friend of mine installed hamm on a Dell laptop with Neomagic video.  He got
> X configured with the VGA16 server.  The X server seemed to work fine, but the
> machine would invariably hang, shortly after quitting X or switching to
> another virtual console.  By "hang", I mean that ugly state where the keyboard
> and mouse don't respond, and a hard reboot is needed.


>   *  The Debian was a 2.0 CD from Cheap Bytes -- not the "Official Debian",
>      but C.B.'s own, with their own installation program.  I was struck by
>      some odities, such as the absence of all the stuff I'm used to in the
>      system logs (I'm running "official" hamm at home).  Could there be
>      anything weird about this Cheap Bytes installation that's related to the
>      X problem?

This could have been a problem, perhaps if you got network
ability you could have updated the install from a debian mirror,
hopefully resolving any errors in libs etc..
 
>   *  I didn't think of checking the BIOS settings, for things like APM.  Could
>      a broken APM cause symptoms like this?  Then again, isn't APM disabled in
>      kernel-images that ship with Debian?

I didnt have any problems with the default kernel and APM, but
then again I have turned off my APM settings, as it says in the
debian install instructions....

So there are a number of possibilities why you did not have
success, none of them can be attributed to the quality of
debian.
-- 
John Stevenson, Objective Alliance: www.oa.nl
"Its grip'd, its sorted.."