Re: New User. Hello
Raphael Bustin wrote:
>
> Hello All. Debian Newbie here.
Welcome! You've chosen the right distro!
> I'm curious why there's no deb package for the
> latest (4.10 ?) version of XFree86. Or at least,
> I haven't found it on debian.org.
>
> Are there issues running 4.10 of XFree86 on
> potato?
Well, Potato does not contain XFree86 4.1.x... Potato is rather
outdated. XFree86 4.x, 2.4.x kernel, GCC 3.x, KDE 2.x, etc. all
represent significant architectural changes, and can't just be added
willy-nilly to a system that is called "stable". Woody (testing) and Sid
(unstable) are much more up to date, but often have major changes on a
weekly basis. If I were running a production server and and "apt-get
upgrade" changed a significant portion of my installed services, I'd be
worried.
Very little gets updated in Potato/stable... small, incremental upgrades
occasionally, but mostly bug-fixes and security updates. In fact, when a
bug gets fixed in a newer version of a given piece of software, the
Debian developers often will back-port the bugfix to the version
currently in stable, rather than putting a version of the software with
newer, unknown bugs in.
> It seems my video card (the one I want to use,
> a Matrox G450) is only supported under V4.10 of
> XFree86.
Never used a G450, but I do know that the G200 and G400 both worked in
XFree86 3.x. You won't necessarily get some of the advanced features
(DualHead, 3D accelleration, etc.), but it probably can be coaxed to
work with the Matrox driver.
> I'd prefer the simplest possible acquire/install
> procedure, so I figured a deb package was the thing,
> right?
If it's just a personal desktop system, I'd recommend editing your
apt-sources and dist-upgrading to Woody/testing. Woody is damn stable; I
have it installed on 7 machines in this room. After I got everything set
up properly (read: advanced stuff in X), I haven't had a single crash
(well, a couple of applications crashed, but they were in beta, or apps
that I wrote that weren't debugged yet, etc., but no X locking up or OS
failures).
> Can anyone recommend a serious tutorial on using
> dselect, or an X-based alternative to dselect?
> I just don't seem to grok it yet... The 'man'
> pages aren't helping. I invariably end up doing
> something wrong while in "Select" mode and end
> up Xing out of that for fear of messing things up.
>
> rafe b.
I personally hate dselect. I use apt-get to do everything. I either look
up the packages I need on the web site, or use apt-cache to search. You
really only need to know "apt-get install", "apt-get update" and
"apt-get dist-upgrade" for 99% of the stuff you will be doing.
--Aaron
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