Re: LBA Mode? Dual Processors? Sound? Graphics? Where? How?
On Tue, 28 Dec 1999, shinelight@pop.crosswinds.net wrote:
shinel >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:
looks like some pretty compadible hardware..
shinel >
shinel >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.
any particular reason why you chose debian as a newbie? i only personally
reccomend debian to newbies if i can help them directly either by getting
console access to their machine or being able to telnet/ssh in. most
others i reccomend suse, corel, caldera, or slackware ..
shinel >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.
CD#2 would contain directories such as 'contrib' and 'non-free' ..and CD#2
i believe uses a slightly modified kernel for some systems that dont boot
with CD#1.
shinel >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?
i saw a while back people talking about the multi_cd option being very
broken, i have avoided it always. 99% of what you want is on CD#1. After
your done installing that, then you can put in CD#2, tell dselect to
update the package information(replacing any existing information) and
select packages from CD#2. But only ver very rarely have i ever used
anything off of CD#2. I download stuff like KDE manually(stuff on the cd
is rather outdated) and XF86 3.3.5 as well using apt. my advice, don't
use the multicd option and at least fornow, forget about CD#2 dont even
look at it chances are you wont need it.
shinel >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.
does your bios support the drive correctly? i assume it does, make sure
the drive is in LBA mode, i have a 18GB drive in a linux machine
now(i430TX chipset) with no issues.. sofar installed both corel linux and
caldera 2.2/2.3 on it without a hitch. at least in terms of drive
detection there is no difference between 18GB and 20GB. The main barriers
in IDE would be 540/545MB, 8GB and 32GB. Still it would not hurt to make
sure you have the latest bios. If all else fails look into the LILO
documentation and see how to pass drive paramters to lilo itself. You
shouldn't have to do this on a modern system though.
shinel >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.
Upgrade your X. If that machine has a network connection and you are
running debian 2.1 then add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list using your
favorite editor:
deb http://www.debian.org/~vincent/ xfree-update main
then run apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade to upgrade XFREE to 3.3.5. Then
run XF86Setup, tell it to ignore current settings and reconfigure. Make
sure the card is supported by XF86. If not grab a new one, i picked up a
voodoo banshee for $39 recently and 2 TNT 16mbs for $44 a few months back
both are very well supported (in both 2D and 3D).
shinel >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 :)
I have never used a packaged kernel, So what I'm about to say may conflict
with what others may do. ftp to ftp.XX.kernel.org where XX=country
code. I ususally hit ftp.dk.kernel.org it was pretty fast the last time i
used it. Avoid ftp.kernel.org it is heavily loaded. cd to
/pub/linux/kernel/v2.2 (path may vary from site to site) and type 'bin'
then 'get linux-2.2.10.tar.gz' 2.2.10 i have found to be a very good
kernel and the only 2.2.x kernel *I* use on production machines. Then,
move that file to /usr/src. Then check to see if there is an existing
linux directory, if there is, rename it or delete it. then make a
directory called linux-2.2.10 and a link called linux pointing to it, then
cd to linux and type make menuconfig.
sample command:
mv linux-2.2.10.tar.gz /usr/src ; cd /usr/src ; mv linux linux-OLD ; mkdir
linux-2.2.10 ; ln -s linux-2.2.10 linux ; cd linux ; make menuconfig
then after you configure the kernel, save and quit, and I usually type:
make dep ; make clean ; make bzImage ; make modules ; make modules_install
it seems complicated but once you've done it 500 times its second nature
:)
shinel >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).
SB Live is supported although not very well:
http://opensource.creative.com/
shinel >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.
shinel >
good luck..lotsa good people on this list will help you just gotta have
patience :)
nate
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