Re: Installation problems
Ken Heard wrote:
> After considerable web research on various distros I decided to
> try the then new Debian 3.1r0a-i386 "Sarge".
>
> After booting -- I thought successfully -- strange things happened
> which did not strike me as quite right. For example:
>
> 1. Printing
>
> I tried first to use CUPS. However, it would only print pdf, html
> and plain text files from Konqueror. It would not print anything from
> Mozilla, nor would it print in terminal mode using the lpr command. I
> then tried LPRng, but nothing would print.
Printing is still a nightmare in Linux, in my opinion.
Some ideas:
* "apt-get install cupsys"; point your web browser to
"http://localhost:631/admin";
* be aware that some printing systems on Debian use lpr; some use lp;
with CUPS, you may need to install cupsys-bsd or some similar package
* printer drivers for cups has, at least in the past, been in some
oddly-named package referring to gimp, something like
gimp-printer-drivers. Your instinct is to think that printing is more
generic than gimp printing, therefore this package must be irrelevant.
It's not.
* basically, you need to do research. As mentioned, printing is still a
nightmare in Linux.
> 2. Removable media
>
> I could not use the 9 cm floppy drive.
Let's see; 2.54 inches to a cm, therefore 9 * 2.54 is something like 18
and some change; wow! An 18- to 27-inch floppy?! Oh, wait, I never could
do math. Maybe that should be 9 / 2.54, which is going to be somewhere
around 3 inches or so. I bet you're referring to a 3.5 inch floppy.
> It took an inordinate time to mount. When it did, I could not write
> anything to an empty mounted floppy. The machine returned the message
> "disk full".
Have you tried a different floppy.
What specific command are you using to mount the floppy?
>
> Konqueror apparently has provision to unmount and eject CDROMs by
> right-clicking on the appropriate file. However this feature did not
> work. I discovered that I could only unmount CDROMs in root.
You probably need to make the cdrom device mountable by normal users. I
believe this is done in the /etc/fstab entry for your cdrom. There may
be some sort of debconf setting that controls this as well, such as
"dpkg-reconfigure cdrom", but I can't think of anything other than k3b
and similar cdrom-accessing applications that have such debconf
settings, so don't spend too much time researching this line of thought.
>
> I also have an internal Zip 750 drive connected to one of the IDE
> cables. This drive I could not use at all.
I've never used Zip on Debian, but I remember from reading posts several
years back that you have to mount the sda4 partition (I believe).
> There were several other problems, but these will do for now.
> Perhaps the others will disappear if these ones are rectified.
In general, you'll probably get better responses if you post only one
problem per thread.
> What I did last week was to take the hda in the P3 box and install
> it in the P4 box in place of the hda in the P4 box which had RH 8
> installed on it. On boot up, hotplug installed without error.
Since you said "these will do for now", and then had a bunch of error
logs that didn't seem relevant to the above-mentioned problems, I nearly
missed this stuff at the end.
> However, another problem occurred. Neither XFree86 nor KDE would
> boot. The boot process left the machine in terminal mode with the
> shell octothorpe prompt (#). When I ran the command startx the machine
> would not respond. The last message in the boot up log read:
>
> Fatal server error:
> no screens found
This is a generally useless error message. What's important is the stuff
above, like what you include further down.
>
> I did however notice one oddity in this log file. Almost at the
> end of it appears this entry:
>
> (II) MGA: driver for Matrox chipsets: mga2064w, mga1064sg, mga2164w,
> mga2164w AGP, mgag100, mgag100 PCI, mgag200, mgag200
> PCI, mgag400, mgag550
>
> I find this entry suspicious. The P3 Celeron Coppermine box,
> where I originally tried to install Sarge, has a Matron AGP video
> card. It was possible to run KDE on this box, although there were
> several features which would not work, including 1 and 2 above.
>
> However, the P4 box has Radeon 7500 card, which presumably
> requires a different front end. If so, should not Sarge be able to
> find it? I did note that earlier in the log file the Radeon card is
> correctly identified.
Sarge's version of X still relies fairly heavily on manual
configuration. Try running "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86".
Below are some of the more interesting tidbits relating to your problems.
> (II) MGA: driver for Matrox chipsets: mga2064w, mga1064sg, mga2164w,
> mga2164w AGP, mgag100, mgag100 PCI, mgag200, mgag200 PCI, mgag400,
> mgag550
> (II) Primary Device is: PCI 01:00:0
> (EE) No devices detected.
>
> Fatal server error:
> no screens found
As you mentioned, you moved the hard drive from a Matrox-containing box
to a Radeon-containing box. X expected a Matrox at 01:00:0; it didn't
find it. Running "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" should go a long way
toward getting this issue ironed out.
--
Kent
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