On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 10:36:04AM -0500, Radek Zajkowski wrote: > Here is a problem, I could not get the X to run from the packages on my > machine. It either would not configure, hang during configuration or refuse > to accept my settings. I am not an advanced user, therefore I often have no > facility to trace these kind of issues. > > As a result I downloaded the binaries of Xfree and it runs as a charm. I > compiled Emacs and my crappy pentium200 is now a bit more friendly, or at > least it offers the alternative to terminal. Hmmm, why did you compile emacs from source? Just because it wanted X? > Although initially this was a matter of curiosity, X runs very smoothly and > I would like to keep it, and enrich it with more software. > > The problem I have created here is rather obvious, the package manager > doesn't know I have X libraries on my system and therefore, anything > requiring Xlibs will not install, since it forces the dependecies to be > configured as well. You probably get the rest of the story. David's suggestion is probably the simplest way to go now, but I would have tried a couple of other things first: $ apt-get install discover mdetect read-edid $ dpkg -P --force-depends xserver-xfree86 xfree86-common $ apt-get install xserver-xfree86 xfree86-common This stanza would have installed X and some auto-detection magic, so it would try to figure out your hardware itself. It seems to work fairly well, at least on x86. If that failed, I would have tried using a newer version of X; http://people.debian.org/~blade/woody/ contains a backport of X 4.2 for woody. After that, installing a non-Debian-ified version would be my final resort, and, had I thought of it first, I'd have used David's symlink method. Right now you could just use 'equivs' to generate fake packages that match up with what you've installed, too. I'm not sure how much of Debian absolutely demands X be in /usr, though... > I would like to find out from you some of the experiences and tactics you > might be employing when dealing with the package systems. Is it packages or > sources all the way, or are hybribds a common thing? There are lots of ways of doing this. If Sid or Sarge has the version you want, then you can (usually) download the Debian source and rebuild it on woody, and end up with a neat set of debs. If it's not packaged somewhere, you can either package it yourself or install it into /usr/local with stow, and use 'equivs' to satisfy dependencies. -- Rob Weir <rweir@ertius.org> http://ertius.org/
Attachment:
pgpGmPXsTLlcW.pgp
Description: PGP signature