video cards, the mouse, Xfree86 and Debian installation.....
Dear Debian folks,
I have installed Debian on my PC here. It runs a 1200MHz Athlon CPU and has
one 20GB disk on it with Fedora Core 5 on it and now after deleted Windows a
second disk (primary) which is 40GB in size has now got the Desktop Debian
installation on it.
At least I think it does.
I have a few questions about the installation process.
I spent quite a while downloading the 15 or so CD iso images from mirror
site using wget and bittorrent (bittorrent was a waste of time - not enough
fellow downloaders).
I then burnt them to CDs and checked them for integrity one by one with the
Debian installer.
I installed the OS a number of times but I got problems getting the X
windows to work.
At the moment the OS is there and boots etc but only in command line mode.
But before talking about this I have some other queries.
When I loaded up the installer it automatically found and configured mu
cable broadband. It looked as though it made use of this to download some
security upgrades while installing from the CDs.
After I got through the partitioning and base install (it never has a
problem with this) I got to the reboot and the tedious entering of passwords
for root and the user.
I then rebooted and fired up the OS. At this stage it tells you to put the
first CD in. It scans through it for what it calls index files. It then
comes at you with a cryptic instruction that says something like "If you
have another CD in your install set please put it in now and get it
scanned". Well, I've got 15 of them......
We are not talking feather linux here.
So I experimented with this in a number of installs. I found that if you
scanned three of the fifteen CDs it seemed to be able give you the option of
installing the Desktop install and the other five or so installs webserver,
print server, donut server, Ronald Reagan neocortex server etc, and it then
seemed to be able to finish the rest of install with some bugs in the font
installation and some other quirks but basically it seemed to work.
But if you tried to only scan one disk it then omitted the Desktop install
option and only presented you with a choice of the remaining five. If you
tried to install then it worked ok but of course there was no XWindows at
all just the command line.
I then tried instaling again and this time I made a mistake of scanning the
first binary twice before the others. Then there was a problem with the apt
get installation which was fatal and it had to be abandoned.
How many of these CDs should be scanned at this stage for index files?
All fifteen?
I wish I had a DVD player on this machine.
I installed again and scanned the first four of the CDs this time and then
installed the Desktop. My video card is an SiS 630/730 according to Fedora.
I put SiS in at what I think was the video card manufacturer choice
setting in install.
There was then some stuff about Power PCs and video card bus identifiers. I
do not know what the bus identifier is for the video card on this machine
and I am not sure how to determine this.
But it seemed as though it only wanted the video bus identifier to be
entered if you were using an Apple PowerPC not an ordinary PC like mine.
So I left it blank. Please let me know if I was wrong here.
I got to the mouse autoconfiguration bit. I tried this but maybe it didn't
work properly. It sounded like it thought I had a serial mouse but I think
I have a 3 button PS mouse.....
I think I should reinstall and then choose manual configuration of the
mouse. But maybe there is a way fire up the mouse installation routine from
the command line interface in my current install which does boot and run (if
you think this install is OK based on scanning only the first four of the 15
CDs for index files).
If you could give me the CLI command for this this would be useful.
I also did what I could do configure Xwindows but was not successful it
seems.
The monitor I use is a 15 inch CRT Belinea device. Belinea is not a
manufacturer that X seems to know much about. But I have got X work OK
with it in Fedora.
I don't know the horizontal and vertical refresh numbers for it. But maybe
I could use Fedora to tell me them and then put high quality information
into Debian when configuring Xwindows for it.
Suggestions here are welcome.
When I tried startx I got a little cross and a little box in the middle of
the screen that said things like "Xsession unable to start X no home/mikef
.xsession file or Xsession file, no window manager, no terminal emulators
found; aborting.
Comments welcome here.
The log messages before X tried to start contained things like"failed to
acquire AGP,AGPdisabled, xf86 open serial cannot open device" etc....
Comments welcome.
How do I run the Xwindows configuration again using the CLI in the install I
have if it is good enough?
Do I have to reinstall again and then configure Xwindows again there to get
it to work?
Where can I get Fedora to remind me the mouse type I have precisely for the
aid of Debian?
Regards,
Michael Fothergill
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