Hasse Bylov wrote:
I've tried SuSE Linux and it worked perfect for me, but a friend told me some great things about Debian, so I wanted to try it out...You're probably installing woody/stable, which is really old, and doesn't have hardly any hardware detection. It's a great OS for a server which doesn't need to have X but does need to be rock solid. However, for a workstation, I think you'd be better off upgrading to sid/unstable. Then your experience is likely to be closer to what you had with SuSE, RH, etc.The whole FTP-install went perfect.Well now I've got this problem with the X-server (see the log-files attached. Btw, I think it's the XFree86.0.log you might wanna have a look at) - Linux won't start X while the display settings are false. I couldn't identify any drivers for my (onbord ASUS) graphics card. I tried selecting VGA, but it didn't go well. With SuSE there was no problem at all (except it couldn't find a "real" gfx-driver, but it worked fine all right - in a res. of 1280x1024, 24bits @ 75Hz).
Why doesn't the system auto detect the whole thing for me like with SuSE, RedHat etc.? Did i miss something?
No; as mentioned above, Woody is ancient and doesn't autodetect hardware.
PS. There is a small error (I think) in the installation. If you create a boot-disk _before_ configurering LILO, it won't return to the setup with this possibility... (?)
The next version of Debian has a new installer, so if you are installing Woody, this'll shortly be a moot point. Still, you might want to search the bug list (http://www.debian.org/Bugs/) to see if this has been reported already, and if not, report it.
<snip> (--) PCI:*(1:0:0) VIA unknown chipset (0x7205) rev 1, Mem @ 0xd8000000/26, 0xdc000000/24<snip>XFree86 has found a valid card configuration. Unfortunately the appropriate data has not been added to xf86PciInfo.h. Please forward 'scanpci -v' output to XFree86 support team.(EE) Unable to locate/open config file (EE) Error from xf86HandleConfigFile()
If I had to make a guess, I'd say that your kernel/X is too old to recognize your video card. What's the result of "lspci"?
If you want to upgrade your system to sid, edit "/etc/apt/lists.sources" and change all network instances (ftp, http) of "stable" to "unstable", EXCEPT for the security line; leave it at "stable". Then run "apt-get update" followed by "apt-get dist-upgrade". Now your "lspci" and X will probably recognize your chipset/video.
If that doesn't solve the problem, you might want to upgrade your kernel. If you are installing Woody, you're probably using a 2.2 kernel still ("uname -a" will verify). You can search for a newer kernel with a command like "apt-cache search kernel-image-2.4" or "apt-cache search kernel-image-2.6". 2.6 is mostly stable now, and as long as you're upgrading, I'd go ahead and jump to 2.6 (unless you have special needs, hardware, software, etc, that needs 2.4).
After upgrading your system and/or kernel, you'll probably have more success in getting X to work (as well as USB, etc).
-- Kent