On Sun, 2002-05-26 at 00:24, allmail wrote: > Dear Peter > > We have experienced a lot of trouble with the Debian distro in terms of > establishing a GUI as well. Debian is not too bad as a server but is fairly > woeful for the desktop at this moment. Our opinion is that there is a need > to totally revisit X-Windows and possibly when this movement has gained a > bit more momentum this serious impediment to getting Debian Linux to the > desktop will be addressed. It seems to us that there is not only a problem > with hardware detection but also the various graphics related routines are > excessively demanding on processor power resulting in a slow machine. I'm not sure I know what you mean. I'm running XFree86 at such a rate here that I can play Quake III Arena (yes, on Linux) at 90fps at 1024x768x32bit colour. My PC is an 800MHz P3 with 256MB RAM, and a GeForce2 MX graphics card. No speed demon, but no slouch, either. The only problem I've found with Debian's XFree86 installation is that there's no hardware detection - other than that, "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" is one of the most sane and user-friendly methods of getting yourself cooking on gas that I've seen. I had extreme problems with a Dell GX240 - but this was because XFree86 4.1, that's shipped with Debian Woody, doesn't understand the ATI Rage 128 Ultra TF. XFree86 4.2 does. *This is not a problem in Debian*. Every operating system has hardware that is not *yet* supported. > We found that Mandrake Linux is very good for getting a GUI onto difficult > subjects such as laptops for example. If you use Mandrake, you will almost > certainly achieve your objective of having Linux run on the Compaq. If you > are very technical, you can then reverse engineer how Mandrake achieved this > feat and copy the various drivers/config files across to Debian to get it to > work. Good luck. Mandrake is...erm... *interesting*. And not in a good way. But that's beyond the scope of this list. I've got Debian Sid running on a truly horrible little laptop - the Acer Travelmate 508DX. All the hardware is supported - nasty NeoMagic graphics, nasty Intel I810 sound, nasty CardBus controller, the lot. And the amazing (or not, depending on your point of view) thing is that all this *worked first time*. Peter -- Peter Whysall peter.whysall@ntlworld.moc The TLD in my email address is sdrawkcab. Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 sid -- kernel 2.4.18
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