Re: Newbie Troubles with Debian
On Mon, May 15, 2006 at 05:09:24 -0700, Mike Hill wrote:
> Greetings. I am an old hardware engineer with many years of working on
> systems hardware. I recently decided to switch to Linux, and so began
> a search for a desktop replacement. My experience has been
> frustrating, and I wanted to ask advice.
>
> I Can can run live, from Knoppix and Puppy. I like Knoppix and even
> installed it to hard drive and played with it for a day. I see there
> is little support from the broader Linux community, so decided to
> install the full Debian. I have done the net install now, 3
> different times. Each time, I get the system running, but no video
> to the graphical desktop. I am using a Gateway with Intel 810
> internal video. I switched to an ATI video card, and installed it a
> second time, still no luck. I then edited the Xxxxx (forgive me,
> but my memory failes me here) file which is the config for the
> X-windows and was able to confirm first it chose VESA for the
> video, second time, it chose ATI, and I even edited it to try the
> standard VGA driver.
>
> Can you point me to a beginner help, or know anyone who might be a
> mentor for a beginner user? This is not so much a bug report as it
> is an install quirk. Thank you for any help.
A nice installation guide can be found here:
http://newbiedoc.berlios.de/wiki/Installing_Debian_on_a_small_partition
For your specific problem: I think your card is supported by the i810
video driver. It should be possible for you run run as root
dpkg-reconfigure -plow xserver-xfree86
and select the "i810" driver, your desired resolution, etc. The dialog
will have some questions which might not mean anything to you (yet).
Normally you can just leave those fields blank or accept the defaults.
After this your X should be working. If not, here are some important
commands for further diagnosis:
Which kernel do you run?
uname -a
Which version of Debian? (I am guessing "stable" aka Sarge.)
cat /ect/issue
Information about your hardware:
lspci
After a failed attempt to start X, list all errors and warnings:
egrep '^\((EE|WW)\)' /var/log/XFree86.0.log
Post this output here if you are still stuck after reconfiguring your X
server.
--
Regards,
Florian
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