Ian Balchin wrote:
Hi,all,
I have just installed potato
Potato is stable, but there's a lot of changes between Potato and Sid
(with Woody being between them), expecially as regards X version 3
version X v.4. You might want to consider pointing your
/etc/apt/sources.list file to sid instead of stable (except for the
security-related line(s)). This is not something you'd do on a
production machine (because stable is, well, stable, and sid is not -
changing very often, often introducing bugs, etc); but I've found sid to
be stable enough for my purposes, and that way I get all the new stuff
that is more likely to have support for that esoteric video or sound
card, etc.
as a dual boot m/c (with dos) on a
new (for me) Cyrix120 PC.
<snip>
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.
Excellent.
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.
Search the Debian mailing list archives, google, and dogpile; that'll
get you a pretty good solution in many cases.
1. The old machine had a sound card after all. How can I
configure that without another reinstall?
Depends on the card? If it's a PCI card, the command (as root) "lspci"
will list all the PCI devices, including the sound card. That'll be the
first step (there are more, but without knowing what card you have it'd
be counter-productive to go any farther with this explanation at this
point). If it's an ISA card, good luck. It can be done, but it just got
more complex.
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?
.gz means that it's a compressed file. You should be able to "zless
filename.gz" it, which will run a "compression-aware less" on it. "less"
is a better (IMHP) alternative to "more", which is a
one-screen-at-a-time viewer for text files. "cat" displays the contents
of a file; "more" or "less" does the same thing only a screen-full at a
time; helpful on big files.
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?
Do you have the lp port turned off in the BIOS, or set to some weird
non-standard settings. I believe that as a general rule Linux ignores
BIOS settings, but still, it's something I'd look into.
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.
I hated setting up X version 3. X v.4 seems to me much easier; that's a
lot of the reason I went to tracking sid instead of stable.
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.
Unless you have a specific DOS-driver for a PS/2 mouse, the DOS test is
probably meaningless. If you do have a DOS driver, that means you
probably have a hardware problem. Again, check the BIOS to make sure the
PS/2 mouse is turned on and set to normal settings.
Install gpm and run gpmconfig to figure out your mouse for the console;
once you've done that, you can move on to getting it set up in X.
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.
