Re: [Sheflug] SuSE 8.2, Debian and XP

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 2004-11-07 at 16:43 +0000, Lesley Anne Binks wrote:
>  well, I was rather disappointed that the woody r2 install didn't get
> to GUI status. 

Ah, but woody never had X auto configuration built in, so it's not
surprising :) [Well, not as standard, anyway ;) ]

If you're installing, and you have mdetect, read-edid and discover
installed, it will auto-configure. If not, it won't bother!

> Mmmmm .... I am beginning to wonder what's up with the Celeron box
> then. I am between the possibility of a kernel problem on the SuSE
> (which now shouldn't exist because of the change over to woody) or a
> hardware fault.  BTW the Ethernet card was correctly recognised on a
> re-install of Suse and when I installed woody. The box is at least 5
> years old now and that disk has been round the block a few times. 

If things are acting 'strangely' - especially with software you already
knew worked - then it does sound of hardwareish. Often, hardware
problems aren't immediately replicable either, they sometimes come and
go (especially if the hardware is working but on the way out..)

> I have got woody r2 on the Celeron box at the moment.  It installs
> fine, I just don't have a GUI working on it and I like having one of
> those. In fact I would say I need one for most of the work I do.  

If you remove all the X packages, install the ones I mentioned, and
re-install the X packages you might find that it does get you to a GUI
login.

> I tried a number of times to compile the kernel source code that came
> with the CD and it failed, not due to deprecated strings but due to
> some hash_defs not existing at all.  With hindsight, I could have
> #def'd those but it is past history now :>  Suse 8.2 released with a
> prelease version of gcc and it was gcc v.3 while most kernel
> literature (for the kernels I was looking at) advises v2.95.

Kernel literature still advises v2.95, but not for necessarily great
reasons (e.g., it's faster at compiling C usually). The compiler SUSE
give you should compile kernels - v3 gcc (so long as it is a 'good'
v3 ;) will compile a working kernel no problems.

I know SUSE did originally ship modified kernel sources that worked with
the compiler they supplied - if you had problems, I would suggest
something else was wrong. 

> I will take a quick shufti at it but I have spent some time
> familiarising myself with the way debian does things.  And the way
> SuSE does things.

Yep, but Ubuntu is basically Debian - the differences are fairly
minimal, but it's a more modern version than the released Debian. That's
why I was thinking it might be a good substitute for Debian for you (for
example, it would probably get a GUI going first attempt :)

Cheers,

Alex.

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