How to test Video Driver & Audio Driver ?

Mel_3 · 11-08-2007, 02:24 PM

newbie here who just got old PC to boot from CD SLAX...

Boots up fine and we can launch KDE gui

But we don't know linux !

Our concern on this old PC is weather there are Linux drivers for the Video and Audio hardware which are built on the mothorboard.

On Video:
- KDE looks OK to me and mouse works... but how can I tell if the video is working at a good or the proper resolution?
- Or how would I tell if the Video was working OK? Other than the... "well I can see it and it looks OK to me..." ??

On Audio:
How can I get linux... or KDE to make some noise via the speakers... so I can hear that the linux audio drivers work OK with this machine.

thanks for any help.

Mel_e

mrrangerman · 11-08-2007, 02:49 PM

Quote:

SLAX is a small bootable CD containing the Linux operating system. SLAX distirbution runs Linux directly from the CD (or USB) without installing.

The Live CD described here is based on the Slackware Linux distribution and is downloadable from this website as an ISO image.

The primary goal of SLAX is to provide a wide collection of useful software while keeping the cd's image small enough to be written to a 185 MB CD-R(W) medium (small 8 cm CD). SLAX boots directly from the CD or USB devices and it provides a full featured Linux operating system.

All your available partitions and data storage devices (CD-ROM, USB storage devices, etc.) should be recognized at boot and should be mounted to /mnt/xx. As an example, "disc0part1" may be assigned to the first partition on your primary hard drive, "disc1part1" for your USB storage device, or "cdrom0" for your CD-ROM drive. SLAX will never write anything to the mounted devices. Mounting is safe and does not change the data.

After booting, you should be able to login as a "root", with the password "toor"; both without quotes, of course.

When logged in, you have many options. At the shell prompt, you may start Midnight Commander (type "mc" to the console), play some music from your hard drive (type "play /mnt/path/file.mp3"), adjust your audio volume (type "alsamixer"), configure IP address (type "netconfig") or browse web pages with the text-based browser (type "lynx http://url").

To start the graphical environment included with SLAX, type "gui" (for graphical user interface). It will attempt to autoconfigure your graphics card, monitor, keyboard and mice, and if successful it will run an X session with KDE. I'm pretty sure that you will know how to get around at this point. :-) Use "guisafe" instead of "gui" for safe-mode (VESA framebuffer) without autodetection.

In the unfortunate case your mouse doesn't work, try to move it for a few seconds to see if it will be autodetected. If it isn't, shut down Xwindow (press Ctrl+Alt+Backspace) and start it again. If this won't help then you are using something I have not included in the autoconfiguration process (COM2 mouse?). If you are comfortable with bash, or you atleast understand how to make your favorite mouse function under Linux, try to modify the symbolic link /dev/mouse manually.

If you don't like the autoconfigured screen resolution, refresh rate, or the K Desktop Environment, start "gui" with some additional options. Try for example "gui 800x600 60", where 800x600 is the desired screen resolution and 60 is the desired refresh rate. Fluxbox is one of the other window managers included and may be called with "guifast" or "gui fluxbox". In any event, type "gui --help" for more information.

I did a 20sec google search and found this.