(previously posted to debian-boot) Hi,
I'd like to submit an idea for your consideration. I've written a simple perl script that can detect many PCI video cards. The idea is to help users select what X server to install. I was wondering if this is something the boot-floppies team would be interested in integrating into the initial setup sequence. The script works best with i386 PCI hardware, and requires a relatively new (2.2) kernel. Though some people have reported success with PCI-based sparc's (with a Mach64 card) and PCI-based ppcs. The script recognizes architecture-dependent configurations. I realize that there is a *lot* of hardware that the script will not detect, such as ISA/VLB type hardware, or many of sun's hardware. While I do plan to add support for some of those, the main idea of the script is to do "non-invasive" probing. This script will not hang your machine. We have programs like SuperProbe that detects many isa video cards, and this script is not a replacement for that. I've put up deb's at http://master.debian.org/~tausq/video/. and would welcome any comments and constructive criticisms on how this might (or might not) work. In particular, there is a script that gets installed in the doc directory (for now), that works like this: tausq[21:23] /tmp% /usr/doc/xviddetect/xinst --test The svga driver should work on your card. Test mode, skipping scheduling of xserver-svga for installation without the --test switch, it will schedule the package for installation using dpkg. (e.g. echo xserver-svga | dpkg --set-selections ) To give credit where credit is due, this was Overfiend's idea. i've only been on this list for a couple of weeks, but i hope to be able to help out with the boot-floppies team more in the near future. randolph -- Debian Developer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.TauSq.org/
