Re: NEW USER set-up assistance
Hi, welcome to Debian!
Jacob W Tennant wrote:
I need some help in setting up my newly installed debian system. It is a
net install system with all of the latest packages running Gnome desktop.
OK, let's start with a few general things: Since the two problems you
mention are hardware-specific, we need to know a bit more about your
system. There are a few very basic commands to get the necessary info:
lspci
lists all PCI devices. Post the output of this command here so that we
know which graphics card and sound card you are using,
uname -a
tells you the exact version of your Linux kernel, and
cat /etc/issue
shows which version of Debian you are using (stable/testing/unstable).
These commands have to be issued from a command line prompt which you
can access by logging in on a console terminal (press CTRL+ALT+F1 to go
the first console and CTRL+ALT+F7 to get back to the Gnome screen) or by
starting a terminal window under Gnome.
My problems are,
1. The video display will only let me use up to 800x600 size whereas the
same monitor under WinXP would work at 1024x768. So how would I go about
correctly setting this in the base config?
There are few packages to help you with configuring the graphical
environment (which is called the "X Window System" under Linux). Make
sure you have the following packages installed: "discover", "mdetect",
"xresprobe" (and "laptop-detect" if you have a laptop). Then try as root:
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
if you use Debian stable or
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
if you use Debian testing/unstable.
This should give you a dialog with the correct graphics driver selected
and with the option to choose a higher screen resolution. In many cases
this is enough to get a working X with a higher resolution.
2. SOUNDCARD - When I activate sounds in Gnome desktop all I get is a
pulsating growl. Sometimes I get no sound at all except a faint beep. I
use the soundcard heavily as a ham radio operator to decode and transmit
RTTY signals.
Make sure that you have the packages "alsa-base" and "alsa-utils"
installed. Then run as root
alsaconf
which should give you a dialog to set up the sound drivers. If this
works without errors you can use
alsamixer
to adjust the volume settings.
Any help would be really great as I am a complete idiot to linux even
after reading some books on it this is my first attempt at using it
exclusively.
Don't worry, once you have learned a few basic tricks and concepts it
will get easier and easier; overall Linux is much more logical than
Windows. If anything that I have written above does not make sense to
you or if the things I suggest do not work, then write back to the list
with the hardware info and we'll go on from there.
Regards,
Florian
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