Ken Heard wrote: > After considerable web research on various distros I decided to > try the then new Debian 3.1r0a-i386 "Sarge". > > After booting -- I thought successfully -- strange things happened > which did not strike me as quite right. For example: > > 1. Printing > > I tried first to use CUPS. However, it would only print pdf, html > and plain text files from Konqueror. It would not print anything from > Mozilla, nor would it print in terminal mode using the lpr command. I > then tried LPRng, but nothing would print.
Printing is still a nightmare in Linux, in my opinion. Some ideas: * "apt-get install cupsys"; point your web browser to "http://localhost:631/admin"; * be aware that some printing systems on Debian use lpr; some use lp; with CUPS, you may need to install cupsys-bsd or some similar package * printer drivers for cups has, at least in the past, been in some oddly-named package referring to gimp, something like gimp-printer-drivers. Your instinct is to think that printing is more generic than gimp printing, therefore this package must be irrelevant. It's not. * basically, you need to do research. As mentioned, printing is still a nightmare in Linux. > 2. Removable media > > I could not use the 9 cm floppy drive. Let's see; 2.54 inches to a cm, therefore 9 * 2.54 is something like 18 and some change; wow! An 18- to 27-inch floppy?! Oh, wait, I never could do math. Maybe that should be 9 / 2.54, which is going to be somewhere around 3 inches or so. I bet you're referring to a 3.5 inch floppy. > It took an inordinate time to mount. When it did, I could not write > anything to an empty mounted floppy. The machine returned the message > "disk full". Have you tried a different floppy. What specific command are you using to mount the floppy? > > Konqueror apparently has provision to unmount and eject CDROMs by > right-clicking on the appropriate file. However this feature did not > work. I discovered that I could only unmount CDROMs in root. You probably need to make the cdrom device mountable by normal users. I believe this is done in the /etc/fstab entry for your cdrom. There may be some sort of debconf setting that controls this as well, such as "dpkg-reconfigure cdrom", but I can't think of anything other than k3b and similar cdrom-accessing applications that have such debconf settings, so don't spend too much time researching this line of thought. > > I also have an internal Zip 750 drive connected to one of the IDE > cables. This drive I could not use at all. I've never used Zip on Debian, but I remember from reading posts several years back that you have to mount the sda4 partition (I believe). > There were several other problems, but these will do for now. > Perhaps the others will disappear if these ones are rectified. In general, you'll probably get better responses if you post only one problem per thread. > What I did last week was to take the hda in the P3 box and install > it in the P4 box in place of the hda in the P4 box which had RH 8 > installed on it. On boot up, hotplug installed without error. Since you said "these will do for now", and then had a bunch of error logs that didn't seem relevant to the above-mentioned problems, I nearly missed this stuff at the end. > However, another problem occurred. Neither XFree86 nor KDE would > boot. The boot process left the machine in terminal mode with the > shell octothorpe prompt (#). When I ran the command startx the machine > would not respond. The last message in the boot up log read: > > Fatal server error: > no screens found This is a generally useless error message. What's important is the stuff above, like what you include further down. > > I did however notice one oddity in this log file. Almost at the > end of it appears this entry: > > (II) MGA: driver for Matrox chipsets: mga2064w, mga1064sg, mga2164w, > mga2164w AGP, mgag100, mgag100 PCI, mgag200, mgag200 > PCI, mgag400, mgag550 > > I find this entry suspicious. The P3 Celeron Coppermine box, > where I originally tried to install Sarge, has a Matron AGP video > card. It was possible to run KDE on this box, although there were > several features which would not work, including 1 and 2 above. > > However, the P4 box has Radeon 7500 card, which presumably > requires a different front end. If so, should not Sarge be able to > find it? I did note that earlier in the log file the Radeon card is > correctly identified. Sarge's version of X still relies fairly heavily on manual configuration. Try running "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86". Below are some of the more interesting tidbits relating to your problems. > (II) MGA: driver for Matrox chipsets: mga2064w, mga1064sg, mga2164w, > mga2164w AGP, mgag100, mgag100 PCI, mgag200, mgag200 PCI, mgag400, > mgag550 > (II) Primary Device is: PCI 01:00:0 > (EE) No devices detected. > > Fatal server error: > no screens found As you mentioned, you moved the hard drive from a Matrox-containing box to a Radeon-containing box. X expected a Matrox at 01:00:0; it didn't find it. Running "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" should go a long way toward getting this issue ironed out. -- Kent -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
