I've been installing all the beta releases, the latest being the
fool's day release of beta 3 and that is the worst for installing X. I
have an S3 Virge generic video card (86c325) and beta 3 freexes as
soon as it reaches the X installation. The only way out is to hit the
reset button. With beta 1 I could install XF86 4 with no problems,
with beta 2 I could install it after everything froze using a text
console and xf86config, with beta 3 absolutely nothing works. After
hitting the reset button my video card was detected by Kudzu, which
promptly froze my box completely. I tried configuring X from a
console, but it didn't work, exited with error no. 2. Eventually the
only way I could get X to work in beta 3 was to do a clean install of
Mandrake 7.2 and then upgrade. Now, I have beta 3 running with XFree
4.0.3.
The X configuration problem has always existed with Mandrake for me
with this card. My first distro was 7.0 and I had to configure that
from a text console, a daunting task for a newbie's first attempt with
Linux. The problem still existed in 7.1 and only in 7.2 have I been
able to complete an installation with working X (oh, and 8.0 beta 1,
for some odd reason). Is there a possibility that this will be fixed
before the third release of 8?
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Pentium 200 MMX
160MB RAM
S3 Virge chipset video card made by Prism, 4 MB video memory
2 IDE HDDs, hda, 8 GB, hdc 3.3GB
Hitachi CD-ROM
Epson Stylus 480 printer
Supraexpress Pro external 56K v90 modem
Yamaha oplas3 soundchip
Internal Hayes chipset winmodem that worked in beta 2 (to my amazement)
but has an IRQ conflict with the sounchip according to the Harddrake
setup in 3.
--
L. A. Lawless
