Hal Vaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I tried this last month and ran into trouble with the video card (ATI Radeon > All-In-Wonder). It turns out the version of X in the current stable branch > does not support my card well. The previous version supported it and 4.2 > supports it. > > So am I better off going into testing and getting X 4.2, or going > backward to 3.x (I can't remember the exact number of the last 3.x > version)?
In general, I'd use the newest version of XFree86 that (a) supports your hardware, (b) has the features you want, and hopefully (c) is included in Debian. XFree86 4.x has much better support for hardware 3-D rendering, so if you need this, you might go forward to 4.2. Otherwise, 3.3.6 has the advantage of having servers included in woody. > Also, what are the consequences of this when I'm installing other > packages? There are a couple of things to remember: you only need the server, and you want to install in /usr/local. You'll have no end of pain if you try to install things in /usr or /usr/X11R6 directly, since APT/dpkg will get confused. When I needed to do this a while ago, it was enough to download a binary tarball of just the X server and unpack it in /usr/local, and then adjust my XF86Config correctly. If you do this, APT might insist that you install another X server, but nothing requires you to actually run it. > Last time around I had some failures when I tried using apt-get to install > some packages (I forgot the error message). Does getting one (or a few) > packages from testing cause problems with installing packages from stable > later? You might be forced into a wholescale upgrade to testing. (This is definitely a possibility if you go to unstable.) You can probably install non-core packages from stable without a problem, though. You'll also need to be careful to keep up on security updates, since testing essentially doesn't get them (and is currently several months out of date). -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
