[Sheflug] Richard's Debian Woes

[Bob Ham <nospam [at] dcs.shef.ac.uk>]

Hello all

I appologise for my absense and not being able to respond to the recent
thread about Richard's debain box, but I have been unwell.  Now that I
am here, I would like to clear matters up.

I believe what Richard said was that (wrt the box) "it's installed, it
just need configuring", and also making a point that it was his box
for work to be done on.  The box was booted up and Mr Simms & Co. set
about configuring.  I believe the system went through its setting up of
all of the installed packages and then an attempt at making X work was
made.  This failed, and so I stepped in, using XF86Setup.  I believe the
failure was that no card was recognised.

I asked Richard what the chipset was, which he told me (but which I
don't remember now.)  There was no listing of the chipset or the card in
the XF86Setup card list, so I set about getting a /proc/pci so that I
could get an explicit and unambiguous description of the card and the
chipset; that being from the card itself.

I untarred the 2.2.12 kernel source from the tarball that was in
/usr/src and compiled it with legacy /proc/pci support.  As a side note,
/proc/pci is not needed, afaik, for an X server to operate.  /proc/pci
contains only textual information describing the devices attached to the
PCI bus; the X server uses (I should think) calls to the kernel to use
the PCI bus itself.

When I had eventually installed the kernel, I inspected /proc/pci and
used that information to find a card in the XF86Setup, which there was.
However, after using the setting for the card's listing, the X server
still reported not being able to find a card (I should point out that
this should be nothing whatsoever with /proc/pci.)

Having failed to find a suitable server, I used the a generic server,
VGA if I remember correctly.  I tried 800x600 and found that it didn't
like it, so set it to 640x480.  The mouse I always set to Auto.  This,
finally, worked.

Running startx brought up debian's default fvwm2 desktop.  The mouse was
working, X was displaying and all was fine.  Richard saw it working, and
I distinctly remember him moving a window and saying "Oh, that's an
xterm", and then going on to say that he would put a better monitor on
the box and put gnome on it when he got home.

So, configuration was required, and configuration was what I did.  The
mouse was working, X was working, the kernel was fine, and it was ready
to be used as far as I could tell.  I don't know what happened between
taken from that table and away from Blackwell's, but it was nothing to
do with me.

Just to clear up matters further, my ears are not made of foam bricks
and hear perfectly well.  The next time someone needs help with a box, I
shall remember to steer well clear.

Bob Ham

--
Bob Ham:  bob [at] timecity.org   http://flux.mentaltempt.org/~node/
IRC: 'Bob' on irc.openprojects.net: #Slashdot #TimeCity
ICQ: 4396425 'The Tek' & 27699423 'The Tek.'

Time City Level Designer
Time City: http://www.timecity.org/
My work: http://flux.mentaltempt.org/~node/tc/

This email is Copyright (C) 2000 Robert Ham.  Copyright is protected in law
in the UK and by treaty in other countries. Permission to reproduce is
strictly forbidden.  If you wish to reproduce this email's content, please
apply by email to bob [at] timecity.org.


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