Hello all. I'm still experimenting with various ways of installing Debian. Since I seem to have hosed the gui on a system I've been using, and since a "new" computer showed up in the dumpster over at the department, my latest victim for cruel Debian install experiments is a P166 with 32MB RAM, 2GB HD and S3Trio64v+ video card (among other things). I chose the floppy install: six diskettes, then everything downloaded from the 'net (the machine had an SMC NIC as well, and I have a fairly fast connection here at the U). So, the base system was installed as Woody (2.2.20 kernel and all). Side note: I really wanted to try out the new installer beta, but I couldn't access any documentation on it (maybe because of the Debian server compromises of late).
After installing the base system, I edited /etc/apt/sources.list and switched over to unstable. I then ran apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade. Then, I proceeded to install additional software - the X window system being the central concern, installed using tasksel. I also installed (apt-got) fluxbox for a WM. Entered settings for my monitor and video card when asked. On next boot, however, I got pretty much the same black screen I wrote to the list about earlier - though that black screen was with a different video card, monitor and computer: it's just blank black, as though the monitor is powered off. The difference in this case is that I can ctrl-altFsomething and get to other virtual terminals. I can also kill X windows by going to the terminal X runs on and hitting ctrl-alt-backspace. This was more than I could do on the other machine. So, I conclude that I'm doing something really fundamental really wrong(ly). I want to start by asking if I should expect the sid/unstable version of X windows to have any conflicts with running on a system using the older 2.2.20 woody/stable kernel (both systems I'm having display problems with run sid/unstable XFree86 and the stable 2.2.20 kernel)? I noted among the messages on screen when either firing up or killing X windows that it was compiled using the 2.4.22 kernel. I also noted a pointer to /dev/mice/??? that my system couldn't make sense of in XF86Config-4, and which I edited to point to /dev/psaux. Before going on to any more in-dpeth trouble shooting on this, I'd just like to ask if I might not be running into problems at some really basic level like using the older, stable kernel with the newer XFree86. Thanks, James - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
