Hi,all,
I have just joined the list. I haven't been lurking here so hope
that I am not offending you guys with my surely simple questions.
I chose Debian because of the GNU aspect, out of sheer orneryness
when everyone was telling me to take the easy route with Mandrake,
Red Hat, or SuSe, and because i liked the name. Not really
sensible reasons I would agree! (except for the first one).
I have just installed potato as a dual boot m/c (with dos) on a
new (for me) Cyrix120 PC. I did several installs to get the hang
of it and recover from errors made. I have it installed with no
packages selected from tasksel (except the final tasksel -s), just
the plainest setup possible (Disks as Violet 2.2 from Obsidian
systems here). I am not that experienced with unix, am just doing
this as a learning experience. Eventually I want to use the
machine for dial up and desktop applications as an alternative to
Windows, but have not yet installed Xwindows, gnome, or dialup
packages, so am only playing at the prompt at this stage.
Is there a FAQ to this list or can i ask away? I have scoured the
online documentation given with the install process for an easy
answer to my problems with no luck, so here goes.
1. The old machine had a sound card after all. How can I
configure that without another reinstall?
2. I have read some of the HOWTO files particularly the one on
printing. This is a file ending in .gz and I cannot get it to
print out. Do I have to extract that particular file out of the
eng.txt first ? If so, how?
3. I note that my selections for lp (port 0x378 & irq7) during
initial install resulted in a failure; even with no entry on the
line it was also a failure. Why would that be?
5. I see that my SiS6215 video card is listed on the Xfree86 site
as a supported card, but it was not detected in the initial
install. xviddetect does not now detect it properly, listing it as
maybe a SiS 82C204 along with other possibilities. I declined to
write the xwin (?) config file on the last install as it would not
detect the video card and came up with error 111 when i tried to
write it previously. What do I do now? It detects a borrowed
Trident TGUI9440 OK but maybe I can't keep that.
6. My PS2 mouse does not work on this machine (not in dos either,
so maybe the port is broken) so how do I change this to a plain
serial mouse? In XF86Setup I cannot get the serial mouse to go
with _any_ settings either.
I would appreciate it if someone could point me in the right
direction here. (I am now sort-of vi competent so can edit files
OK).
Thanks
Ian
Ian Balchin
Grahamstown, South Africa.
