Debian: Reconfiguring X to new video card

[Paul King]

Well, I downloaded and configured most of the packages and dependencies. Then 
came the X server. I was not given the option to configure radeon as the 
chipset (I could only get ati), and dpkg-reconfigure would not write the new 
configuration to /etc/X11/XF86Config. So I ran it with the original 
configuration I intended for the card, with "radeon" as the driver in the 
Screens section.

It crashed with the error "no screens found". I looked at the X11 error log 
under /var/log, and I saw 4 sub-versions of my card listed in the informational 
part of the debug output. 

There was two warnings and one error message. One warning was X complaining 
about APM failing (I don't use APM on a PC), and the other was about the 
Cyrillic font not being found.

Just about everything after that was informational, except the last status 
message, an error saying "No devices detected". This is with agpgart and radeon 
modules loaded.

Paul King

> On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 02:56:20PM -0500, Paul King wrote:
> > I tried to install the debs for the new x server. However, Debian really
> > doesn't like it when you do that. I got a *lot* of packages it wanted to
> > uninstall, which I created a script to reinstall again. It would only
> > reinstall the stuff if I first got rid of the new X server. So I was back to
> > square one. That is, I am relieved to report that I had gotten nowhere rather
> > than backwards.
> > 
> > Great. Now, Lennart said something about going to www.apt-get.org to download
> > some kind of animal called a "back port". It sounds like an attempt to
> > shoehorn the compatabilities in 4.3 into 4.1. Getting 4.3 is a non-starter,
> > since Debian won't allow it, won't configure it without downloading a bunch of
> > other upgrades such as a later version of libc6 than the one I have. It won't
> > find those packages anyway. If I can add things to 4.1 to make it recognise my
> > card like 4.3 does, then so much the better.
> 
> Well a back port is simply taking the source of a package in a newer
> debian release, and changing whatever is needed to make it work with an
> older debian, and then recompiling it.  This among other things makes it
> be compiled with glibc 2.2 rather than 2.3 (which testing and unstable
> use).  You can't just install packages from testing or unstable on
> stable as you have probably discovered since most things need a newer
> libc version.  The backport WILL give you 4.3 with proper dependancies
> for woody (along with the minimal set of packages that have to be
> upgraded to support the new X version).
> 
> > AFAIK, my Debian is current to release 2, and there doesn't seem that there is
> > any way to tell apt-get about the unstable distribution, nor of any intention
> > to upgrade to unstable (I thought all you needed to do was edit sources.list).
> > apt-get update sees the unstable directories added, yet won't recognise it
> > when I tell it to install 4.3.
> 
> Unstable has 4.2.1 not 4.3.  experimental has 4.3 (not apt-get'able).
> 
> Perhaps this one will do:
> deb ftp://linux.upsa.es/pub/XFREE4.3/ ./
> 
> I found that on www.apt-get.org by searching for xfree86 packages for
> i386.
> 
> Note that these will probably NOT work on testing or unstable, so make
> sure you did not upgrade the system after running apt-get update with
> unstable in your sources.list
> 
> > dselect would be nice to use if I could get the 4.3 server listed in its
> > database somehow. It seems to automatically add anything I need to support a
> > package by selecting just the one package.
> 
> You can if you add one of the repositories that have 4.3 to your
> sources.list, which none of the official repositories have since no
> version of debian includes any version of X higher than 4.2.1.  I run
> debian unstable on my desktop and I only have 4.2.1, which works fine on
> my TNT2 of course (although the nvidia-glx 5328 driver probably would
> support just about any nvidia card).
> 
> Lennart Sorensen
> --
> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
> TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
> How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml

=========================================================
Paul King              http://www3.sympatico.ca/pking123/


--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml