Johansson Mikael (mj) wrote:
Ah, you've just run into the single biggest flaw in Debian. It can be tough to install and set up hardware. But once you've got it going, Debian is "da bomb"; it's great.Hello. Hardware: AMD Athlon processor 1,2 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 30 GB HD Video Card Pro Savage 1. When trying to install Debian Gnu/Linux the video card is not recognized by the installation program. I am asked to install drivers for it. How is this done? When using Win 2000 the cd following the motherboard can be executed automatically.Even if I find Linux-drivers for this video-card I dont know how to install them properly using debian Gnu/Linux. What is the general way of installing hardware in debian. Is there aspecial program in the OS that does this and all I have to do is place the proper driver in the proper place.
I'm assuming you have installed Stable/Woody. I've had better luck with hardware "detection" using Unstable/Sid, because it has newer versions of such things as the X Window System, which tends to do a better job of finding video cards. (I'm assuming you're looking for X video drivers.) However, you may want to stick with Stable until you get your feet wet (or if this is a server that needs to be rock stable, but then you probably wouldn't be _needing_ X on there).
Your best bet would be to run "lspci" and post the video-related part to this list. The chipset is more important than the name on the video card, and lspci will hopefully report this info. Then run "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" and at one point you'll be asked which driver to use. Hopefully the correct driver for your chipset will be listed. If not, that's beyond me, but re-post at that time with what you've learned and perhaps others on this list can help out.
2. I want to set up my computer to run both Linux and Windows. Is this possible?
Absolutely. There's lots of documentation out there for that, but the short answer is to install Windows first, making sure to leave enough space free on your hard drive during the partitioning phase (method depends on version of Windows) for your Linux partitions. Then install Linux. Then tinker with /etc/lilo.conf and re-run lilo (assuming you're using the "default" of lilo, and not grub or something else). Then reboot and there you go. Of course there are other ways to do it, like if you've already got Windows taking up the entire drive, you can use something like Partition Magic, or fips if the drive is FAT (not NTFS), to resize the partition, etc.
This will allow you to choose to boot into Linux or Windows at boot time. If you want to run Windows within Linux (or vice-versa), that can be accomplished to, but with more headache and (recommended) more cost (recommended because VMWare is the route you want to go, although you could try plex/bochs - I forget today's name for the app, or even other routes).
-- Kent