LBA Mode? Dual Processors? Sound? Graphics? Where? How?
Hello, I have spent a very futile and frustrating day with Debian. Actually, let me make that two difficult weeks and today was the final straw. First, here are my system specs:
Intel L440GX+ Server Motherboard <http://www.intel.com/go/serverbuilder/>
384MB Siemens PC100 SDRAM
Western Digital 20GB 7200RPM EIDE HD (running at ATA/33 since that is the highest mode the motherboard supports)
Dual Intel PIII 500mhz CPUs
Sound Blaster Live! Value
Onboard Video - Cirrus Logic CL-GD5480 PCI (I'm waiting for the Voodoo5 5000 to come out before getting the video card up to speed)
No floppy drive (can usually swipe one if necessary)
Sound Blaster 8x CD-ROM drive (it is kind of flaky, though)
Dual booting with:
/dev/hda1 Win98 (3.5GB)
/dev/hda2 Linux ext2 (/) (4GB)
/dev/hda3 Linux Swap (128MB)
Okay, well, those may not be the most impressive specs of all time. My system is slowly getting up to what I would consider to be a "dream machine." Anyway, onto the problems with Debian:
1) I am a newbie. This poses a problem by itself. It means that all responses to this e-mail need to be well stated and decent details shown to me. Over the past couple weeks, I have successfully tweaked some important things such as the message of the day (/etc/motd) and sort of set up X...I can do things like kill X sessions, shutdown (Debian needs newbie docs), etc.
2) I can't figure out which CD is CD #1. I borrowed someone's distro (which they downloaded about 3-4 weeks ago and burned onto 2 CDs) and I think the CD with the netscape binaries is the CD #2, but I'm not sure. Both CDs are bootable and have no apparent installation differences, but the second CD supposedly doesn't load drivers into memory.
3) Minor Problem: The dselect CDROM option is VERY different from the multi_cd option. I found this out today and I think I will need to re-install everything (for the 6th time :P) What exactly is the difference?
4) HUGE, MASSIVE PROBLEM! Fdisk will not recognize my hard drive correctly. It is using the CHS method and even reports my HD CHS attributes incorrectly as well. From what I can tell, this poses no serious threat except that I cannot use my 20GB HD to its fullest potential.
5) ANOTHER HUGE PROBLEM! As I said before, I sort of got X to work. From what I can tell is that there is no support for my onboard video card and X refuses to take a similar card as a substitute (even though I know it would work). As if pixelized 320x200 VGA graphics weren't annoying enough, X scrolls the screen! I can do pretty much everything in X, but SVGA (even 640x480) would be better than what I'm getting now.
6) Another, minor problem: I don't know how to recompile a kernel, let alone find where the SMP line is. I would really like to use BOTH CPUs in my machine :)
7) BIG PROBLEM: No sound and I have no idea as to what packages I need to get it. I really don't care if I don't get SBlive! quality...I just want sound. Quality can come later as far as I'm concerned. Linux doesn't even appear to recognize that there is even a card in the PCI slot (checked /proc/pci and it "looked" empty to me).
I knew that I would have problems with Debian, not only because I am a newbie, but also because I have some fairly decent hardware installed. I chose Debian, however, because I knew its packaging system is better than RedHat's and I really don't want problems down the road.
Thomas Hruska
Shining Light Productions
"Meeting the Needs of Fellow Programmers"
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