Debian on 4760 = The Shizneh

For my fourth go-round (after gentoo, slackware, redhat) I tried Debian. It was a 3.0 (woody) ISO that I had around from like two years ago, and I was surprised to find that a newer major version wasn't available so I went ahead and used it.

The install was a breeze! I think it helped to know exactly what options to pick during setup though. I'll post those below plus hints when I get the other bits up to par.

As a bonus, this evening I set up printing with CUPS. Successfully!!

yay!!!

I am pleasantly surprised to find out how many packages are available via the apt tools and how easy they are to get. The init and boot setup arrangements are little obfuscated for my taste, but that seems OK: there are good tools to manage it with.

Gonna install ACPI, video drivers, sound, and wireless networking next. Since I think I can compile a stable-series kernel now that I know how to get around the 'lost interrupt' thing, I believe I should be able to get the wireless LAN working. Report to follow!

Disappointing news about video

Well, I spent most of the day today trying to get video fully supported. I now believe the full 1440x900 resolution was never supported in Slackware under X either - it just looked nice enough at 1024x768 that I couldn't tell. I am comfortable saying at this point that the 4760's widescreen and M9 capabilities are NOT utilized under linux. At least until the software catches up.

Here is the full story...

The first thing I tried was installing the ATI drivers for XFree86 4.2.x. I compiled the driver and set it up as detailed in laclasse's install guide, but when starting X with that driver I only ever achieved one of two states. Either the display came up blank (and I had to exit X by hitting ctrl-alt-delete and hitting "enter" to dismiss the invisible ok-to-quit dialog box) or the display came up really scrambled. The desktop was compressed and tiled two and a half times vertically on the screen, with multicolored lines moving through it horizontally. I could see the desktop enough to select the 'log out' menu choice, but only because i knew where in the menu it was located.

In order to force the driver to work, I tried messing with the hsync and vrefresh values. The values I started with were 60 MHz and 60 MHz (advised by Adam as standard for all LCDs) and I tried tweaking them to 61 and 60, 60 and 55, 60 and 72, etc. Nothing helped. I couldn't find anything else that could possibly be tweaked. Since I did get *some* result from it, I thought that ruled out the possibility of a trivial configuration mistake (like, wrong monitor or something).

Finally I gave up and fell back on the default VESA driver. This driver did work at 1024x768, but when I tried to set the resolution to 1440x900, nothing happened. I couldn't even get 1280x1024 out of it.

Finally, I tried the built-in experimental Radeon support in the kernel under the framebuffer section. In theory, this could be enabled at the boot prompt and then you could get framebuffer console (complete with penguin image) without the 'vga=xxx' LILO option. So, I compiled the radeon framebuffer support into the kernel and tried booting with the parameter "video=radeon:1024x768-8@60". Nothing. Just in case it was a naming issue I tried "video=radeonfb:1024x768-8@60". Still nothing. I tried changing the radeon driver to a module, giving up on the idea of a framebuffer console but thinking maybe the fb could be enabled after the fact and then used by X or DirectFB. However, when I tried to 'modprobe radeon', it couldn't find the module, and when I forceably used 'insmod' on the 'radeon.o' that was clearly in the lib/modules tree, I got a bunch of unresolved symbol errors. I think this driver is still too green. Or I am applying too many kernel patches.

If there is anything anyone can think of that I've left out, please let me know.


Someone once said that Linux is the ultimate computer virus. At this point I don't doubt it. What else but an infectious pathogen would force someone to spend every spare moment of a week of their lives fighting an uphill battle to propagate it?

hrana,

Thanks - & I'd be happy to give you my impressions. But there are a lot of people (um, like most of them) who are more widely versed than me. Check out http://www.distrowatch.com/ - there you can find pros and cons of all of the major choices.

I am still a Slackware girl at heart. The environment is really simple, and I like really simple. But, Debian has won me over with its package system. I've used RedHat and its rpms and they are also cool, but I think the apt system is more convenient. Now, if they could just institute an apt-style distributed Slackware-package fetching system, I would be in heaven.

RedHat's graphical install is impressive, though. And I understand that RH as a distro has made some pretty valuable innovations which have since been imitated. But in my mind, RH doesn't have either of the major distinctions above (simplicity or convenience), so it doesn't appeal to me. I suppose what it DOES have is ubiquity - and that might be a reason to choose it over any other. (Also, if I knew RH better than any other dist, I would see that as a good reason to stick with it.)

Never used Mandrake or SuSE, but they are both very popular. I tried Gentoo briefly, and I regret not giving it more effort, because it seems like a very modern, very capable distro, if you have the processing power to the compilation (and these days most of us do.)

BUT, what I really want to install isn't even a distro. Ever since learning about it a few years ago, I have wanted to try Linux From Scratch. Seems like no better way to learn in full detail about how a linux system works. Also, the rebel individualism that this kind of approach represents is appealing, in a survivalist kind of way.

- Ratha

oh yeah and if anyone wants any of my copious notes (and screenshots) on installing debian on this machine please let me know. otw i'm letting drop it to my backburner to be filed in the archives.

Willy,

You are probably going to need to use the boot parameters "noprobe nopcmcia nousb". As soon as the RH cd boots up, first thing, it should give a prompt that says "boot:" and ask if you need to specify any parameters. It will say what the image name is - this is usually "linux". If that's what it is, you type in at the prompt: "linux noprobe nopcmcia nousb" (no quotes).

From there you should be good to go.

One caution, I have had very bad luck running X on the 4760. I couldn't get the radeon drivers working at all, and when I used the generic VESA framebuffer driver (which is supposed to work with anything) it would only run at a stretched version of the standard 1024x768 resolution, plus X would often crash when I shut it down or logged out (and sometimes when I started it up.) I would have to reboot the entire machine to remedy the lockup. I hope you don't have this experience, but forewarned is forearmed. I have my fingers crossed that the newer software on the way (2.6 kernel with its newer video drivers, DirectFB with *its* radeon support, etc.) will come to the rescue. For right now I just run my 4760 on console, using VNCserver to run any X applications, with a viewer set up on the windows box next to it. I am also sorely tempted to run linux on the desktop windows box and windows on the laptop, since there is so much nice hardware being wasted on my 4760 right now...

Cheers,
- Ratha