wtf? (long and frustrated)
There ought to be a list for debian wannabes. I've tried several times
to get woody going on a couple different boxen - most recently a Dell
Latitude laptop.
Console is fine; X, of course, has been the problem (I haven't even
looked at the PCMCIA Ethernet and wireless cards yet).
When the installer says, "Have fun," and reboots, the screen blinks a
couple times, and a curses dialog box comes up saying it can't run X,
telling me why, and offering to run the X configuration program - that's
cool. I say, "Yes," and a program starts - IN X!!!
This is not funny, folks; it's sadistic.
The mouse doesn't work, but there's a window telling which keys on the
numeric keypad to use instead. Laptops don't have numeric keypads, and
the system knows this is a laptop (I installed "Support for Dell
laptops" and I saw something flash by while it was booting).
After a while I noticed that some non-numeric keypad keys would move the
cursor around and simulate mouse clicks. When I 'clicked' on a menu
item, the screen went blank.
When I pressed ctl-alt-backspace, the screen slowly faded to white.
I've installed Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE on this machine with no
probs. I've used video and screen data from the XF86 config files from
those installs, and from Dell's dox.
Is there some FM or FAQ I've missed? Is there a CI program on Debian to
configure X? Or is vi /etc/X11/XF86Config it?
I'm a 60 year old retired programmer, and I sure would like to see what
all the fuss is about before I die of old age...
(Everything worked perfectly the first time, BTW, installing woody on my
sister's old iMac, but I want it on my laptop.)
--
Glenn English
ghe@slsware.com
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