September 03, 2003
Linux video woes
In an attempt to resurrect my crashed linux box (the third box this summer) I've experimented with different Linux distributions.
Knoppix, not ready for prime time. Yeah, it boots from CDROM but it's gawd-awful slow when doing it. This is not unexpected but it still sucks. That and it seemed to hang during basic stuff.
Debian, nice but still too geeky. The installer didn't do as thorough a job as one might like. Having it forget how to speak to the on-board Adaptec SCSI drive it just booted from was tedious, at best. Shades of NT3.51!
RedHat wins again. The installer for 9.0 worked like a champ. It found everything and did a very thorough job of presenting options and installing them. Time will tell if it's still as bad as 7.x was for dealing with .rpm foolishness.
The only trouble I'm having is the on-board ATI Mach64 VT chipset seems to trip up X. Trying to configure it for 800x600 in thousands of colors causes a hard reset. It just zoinks right out of X and straight back to a cold reboot, as if the reset switch itself was used. Googling as yet to produce a definitive answer.
It's an ancient Dell 2200 P3/333 dualie so it's not like I didn't expect something to go wrong. But it's been a tireless workhorse for SMB and HTTP service so it's not like I feel the need to put it out to pasture yet. If I can't get the on-board video to behave then I can always use a PCI card.
If anyone's got a tip on proper RH9 configs for this machine/card let me know.
Actually, one thing you might want to try is *installing* knoppix. All of the advantages of a redhat-esque (high) level of hardware recognition, and all of the advantages of Debian. knx-hdinstall in a root console will install a knoppix/debian system to a partition of your choice.
It's one of my favourite lazy ways to stick linux on a machine when I don't have the energy to do anything else. ;)
I noticed your forum post re: the truemobile 1300 elsewhere on the web, and wondered how successfully you'd got it to work under linux; the information about recent 1300s seems somewhat contradictory; whilst most of them have the chipsets made by broadcom, I've seen a few ebay 1300s which claim to be orinoco (how reliable this information is isn't known, but it's worth a little hope, at least).
I'm guessing I won't be stopping back any time soon.. if you *do* have any information about the card, I'd be most happy if you'd mail me. *lame plea*.. take care! :)
Posted by: njan on September 7, 2003 07:38 PM
