Re: Lots of problems - help please
On Thu, 2004-06-24 at 10:27, Daniel Klein wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm having a whole damn lot of problems here, pretty much all of a sudden.
>
> Ever since a good friend helped me install debian (let's say he's a
> little on the hectic side.. I didn't see everything he did), there was a
> problem with getting X to like my mouse (IntelliMouse Explorer).. I had
> to type startx twice to get X and KDE up and running, but then things
> were fine. Now everything's come crumbling down.
>
> First of all, I had the alt-tab bug for some time (see my other mails in
> this list). That behaviour has stopped now. Alt-tab stopped working
> altogether, I get the taskbox and NOTHING ELSE. I can close it with ESC.
> Great. Next, my mouse has become sluggish like hell. We're talking maybe
> 3 or 4 fps when I move the cursor around.
>
> Also, I fail to remember what dpgk-reconfigure I have to run to do
> anything to my X Server. It is absolutely foggy to me, why X runs KDE
> (I've looked around the X config files and found no mention of KDE at
> all). I wanted to try fvwm, just to see if that'd run bearably fast
> (we're talking Athlon TB 1200 / 512 MB RAM / very fast 200 gigs hd /
> Geforce 3). I have absolutely no clue how to do that in debian.
>
> I love apt-get for the easiness of installing things, but do any of you
> have any idea what a headache it is to find out what a certain package
> is called? If there was a simple 'list everything that's installed' (and
> I'm sure there is, I just can't find it) command, that would help
> already. There's xf86config, xf86cfg, dpkg-reconfigure
> whateverIhavetotype here and the settings in KDE. This is a damn
> headache, and I'd be infinitely grateful if someone could help me with this.
>
> The alt-tab behaviour is totally unbearable right now. I want to solve
> this somehow, but I have no idea what to do. I know this is the linux
> mailinglist joker, but I'm seriously considering going back to Windows
> for good, and that'd be after 3 years of using Linux and trying my best
> to manage it. I had such high hopes for debian as well, it seemed perfect :/
>
> Thanks for any help you can offer.
Hi Daniel,
Maybe you should just make a clean install of debian on a different
partition of your machine. That will leave you with a working system
with the least messing around with debian internals - and it's what
Windows users typically do every couple of years to clean up cruft. Yes,
I'm sure that it's possible to repair your existing system, but that
could be more difficult..
You don't say what Debian version you are using; if you are using
"sarge", aka "testing", then there is a very nice new installer that
makes the process much easier than it used to be. And the new
installer's hardware-detection is very good.
To find what packages you have installed using the command-line, you can
use:
dpkg --list
See "man dpkg" for more info.
Or you could use the GUI package manager "synaptic". There is then a
nice drop-down box that allows you to say "show me all installed
packages". Though maybe with your mouse problems a GUI app is not so
easy to use at the moment...
NB: Can anyone point me to a reference that describes what the flags on
the left of the "dpkg --list" output (eg "ii", "rc") mean? I know "ii"
means "installed"..
Regards,
Simon
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