Re: Newbie Troubles with Debian
Mike Hill wrote:
> 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.
So you know your hardware works - good.
Just so you know; installation of Debian is usually the biggest hurdle
in dealing with Debian; if you get past this, the rest if fairly smooth
sailing.
Once you edited /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 (or /etc/X11/xorg.conf, depending
on which version of X you're running, which probably depends on whether
you've installed Sarge, Testing, or Sid), the automagic tools for
configuring X will no longer work; they'll see that you've manually
edited the file, and assume you know what you're doing. (But the tools
don't tell you that; they just fail silently, which I believe is a bit
of a bug.) So first thing you probably want to do is to get that file
back in automagic mode. At the top of that file is about three lines of
instructions for accomplishing this. Go do those instructions now; I'll
wait.
Okay, now we need to make sure you have the basics of a GUI installed.
There are several "faces" you can use on your GUI; two of the more
popular ones are KDE and Gnome; you can switch between them and dozens
of others at your leisure, but for now, I'll point you toward KDE since
it's probably the most Windows-like.
To install the basics then, run as root this command:
apt-get install x-window-system kde
(I personally would suggest "aptitude" rather than "apt"; you won't see
much difference, but there's some under-the-hood advantages. If
"aptitude" is not installed, "apt-get install aptitude" should get it
for you; however, I'm not sure "aptitude" is available on Sarge/Stable,
which is likely what you have installed.)
Once all those basics get installed, run "startx" as a normal (non-root)
user. (Starting X as root should fail, I believe.) What happens? The
answer to this question determines where we go from here.
--
Kent
Reply to: