I decided to partition my work W2K machine (Dell Optiplex GX240 - 1.7GHz P4, 256MB, the aforementioned ATI Rage 128 thingy) and install Debian. Thought, "Hmm, this is a nice modern machine. Should be a doddle."
Ho ho. What a jape I was in for. Installation went fine, a little dance around because I'd neglected to install a kernel (was booting off Rescue) but I downloaded a kernel-image deb file on another machine, plonked it on a CD and installed it. Firstly, LILO wouldn't install. This was a pain in the bum, but not disastrous - once I'd made myself a boot floppy from my actually running kernel (kernel-image-2.2.20-idepci) it was tolerable. After all, one rarely has to reboot Linux during the installation process. Did some basic package-installation tasks - aptutils, aptitude, etc. Switched from stable to unstable, did a dist-upgrade (at which point I decided to snarf a kernel source package and the kernel-package package - mysteriously, when I installed my custom kernel package, LILO decided to work. Go figure.) And there the fun stopped. apt-get install x-window-system <stuff> Run xf86config (like I have literally hundreds of times before), pick my card off the list, away we go. No dice. "No screens found". Eh? Cue much waffing about by me, twiddling various bits of XF86Config/XF86Config-4 (Yes, I had both :0). "No screens found". Give up. Find a useful-ish page on Linuxnewbie.org that mentions the fact that although the ATI Rage 128 is supported, XFree86 4.1 doesn't detect it right, and you need to munge your XF86Config(-4) to fix it by explicitly specifying the "r128" driver, not the "ati" one. "No screens found." Sigh. I broke. I sinned. I downloaded the Linux binary distribution of XFree86 4.2.0, renamed /etc/X11 and /usr/X11R6 out of the way, ran Xinstall.sh, and it worked first time, giving me glorious 1280x1024x32bpp loveliness. A sort of choppy install of GNOME followed (I really want an virtual package or a task to do that for me, instead of my "damn, forgot gnome-session, damn, forgot gnome-applets etc etc" approach) but I'm cooking on gas. I'm not going to ask when 4.2 is going to be in unstable because the answer to that is "when it is". What I /would/ appreciate is any clue on getting the Rage 128 to work with XFree86 4.1 so I can stay Debianized? (If I wanted to dink around with tarballs I'd run Slackware) PS. Anyone have any clues as to why the disk performance on this box is slow? This manifested itself on 2.2.19, 2.2.20, and 2.4.18. Very boggy at times. Regards Peter. -- Peter Whysall [EMAIL PROTECTED] The TLD in my email address is sdrawkcab. Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 sid -- kernel 2.4.18
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