I got a copy of Debian from Glenn (thanks Glenn!), my wife's colleage. It is a 2 CD Debian 3 distr (I think) based on the 2.4.18bf24 kernel image.
I have a IBM PC 300 PL (Pentium 2 300mhz) with 128mb of memory and 20GB of hard disk space. The VGA card is S3 Trio 3D and I think the network card is tulip based. I have an old version of Debian on it which is broken due to my stupidity of installing Gnome 2.2 which sucks at this moment (bleah!) and Windows 2k (always have this as a backup that you usually never have to go to but then again maybe someday I can see the light of using Windoze).
The installation was pretty straight forward if not for the X windows problems that I have due the the S3 Trio 3D card that I have.
Firstly, a question that puzzle me and still do right now is what is the best way to partition my 20GB hard disk to give the best performance. So I went to Debian's official documentation, read a bit and came up with the following partition schemes.
hda1 Primary 10479.01 - Mounted / using ReiserFS
hda5 Logical 49.36 - /Boot1 (I don't know why this is here but i leave it anyway in case it makes me not able to boot into my Windows partition)
hda6 Logical 5198.38 - /home using ReiserFS
hda7 Logical 197 - Linux Swap (I think the documentation says as rule of thumb use same amount as the amount of available memory so i did this 128mb plus a little bit more just in case ;) )
hda8 Logical 49.36 - /tmp (the docs recommend it on separate partition)
hda3 Primary 4565.04 - Win2k FAT32 (my old windows 2k partition)
The whole installation went smooth. I just skip through most of the questions using defaults except for CVS which I enabled pserver (I want to experiment with this because sourceforge use it) and a couple of other small details. After done, when I hit startx it crashed! What I've selected was S3 Trio 3D from the VGA driver package. I've somehow expected this because the configuration somewhere says that Trio 3D is not supported. I couldn't decipher the error message. I tried using xf86cfg (instead of xf86config) which is the graphical configurator for X and it went into graphics mode ok. It detected S3 Virge which is strange but it can go into graphics mode anyway. So I resaved the configuration but X still crashed on me. I figured somewhere out there in the pile of bits and bites the VGA driver has been locked somehow. I also tested my network card which i set as Tulip but it can load the module but cannot ping my router!
Anyway I figured, oh what the heck, let's reinstall. As a famous busy bee once said "When you're stumped and hit a dead end, reformat and reinstall!"
So the next time around, I make sure I selected S3 Virge and it worked! But my network card is still down, DUH!
Posted by zoo at February 15, 2003 01:00 PM