OK I'll start off with an introduction which you can skip if you don't want to waste your precious time
Me and Linux:
I kept hearing wonderful things about linux and it's magical stability and power in articles and stuff I read, eventually decided to try it out. bought an old junk computer from a local dealer, and I was off. Power? ok. Ease of use? way better than expected... sometimes... Stability? heh... depends... (yeah I know it can be incredibly stable for the sorts of things that really need it, but for general desktop, I'd say less than magical. put that way it sounds bad but I really mean "excelent" usually)
But being a windows user, I was hooked immediately. I eventually settled on Ubuntu because it seemed good - sponsored development, regular releases, the sent free stickers with my shipment of cds.
So that's me and linux.
iBook and I:
I got my brother's old iBook when he got a new one after spilling sprite on the keyboard - cost me a whole 15 dollars to get one of those flexible portable usb keyboards. He had gotten this one right before OS X came out, so he had both OS 9 and X because some of the programs with it didn't work in X. So I got fed up with all the software I downloaded only working for later versions of OS X quickly, and popped in the ppc ubuntu and wiped the whole hd clean with that install. I also installed kde and xfce to try them out, especially xfce because it's an old slow computer.
Anyway, Ubuntu has been.... less than what it claimed to be for this laptop. Various eventually started making me mad, and I'm not a huge fan of the colour brown.
The think that frustrated me most with ubuntu is their claim of an active community support thing. Sure, it's very active, but with all their push to get more users, there is a hugely disproportionate amount of people asking questions compared to answering them. That was sooo frustrating.
So I started experimenting with other distros, most didn't work so I gave up, yellow dog seemed interesting, but I got very pissed off at the enlightenment desktop thing quickly, plus stuff started breaking. I actually went back and gave xubuntu one more shot before trying slackintosh, and it didn't fail.... in having issues.
So anyway, I found out about Slackware (slackintosh port in my case), figgured I'd give it a shot. Ease of use and stability are the goals? sounds perfect. The community seems friendly and supportive and active. So now (unless I'm totally mistaken about the community part) I'm determined to stick it out with slackware and get it working.
anyway I ran into my first problem shortly after the actual install completed.
------START HERE IF YOU SKIPPED INTRO--------------
the computer:
iBook
G3 (I think...) 500MHz
64 MB ram (300 or so MB swap)
10GB HD
The Linux:
Slackintosh 12.0 (first 3 cds of 4 - maybe my problem right there?)
The Story:- Started installing, selected full install.
- Got to cd 4 which it wouldn't accept, I didn't want to re-download and/or use another cd, so I selected the option that was something to the effect of "finish up installation now". (basis of idea 1 - see below)
- It finishes up, does its stuff, I set root password, blah blah, I reboot. Starts up, looking good.... Brings me to:
Code:
Welcome to Linux 2.6.21.5 (tty1)
darkstar login: _
- I login as root... (thinking, wierd - no graphical login screen), get:
so, based on my vast(ly huge in-)experience in this whole linux thing, I hit it with "startx"
- it very quickly writes a few things and then the screen blacks (I think, YES) and then very quickly it comes back revealing this whole big message and I'm back at root@darkstar:~# _. (damn.) I'll just write out the errors and warnings it gave:
Code:
(WW) ****INVALID IO ALLOCATION**** b: 0xf0000400 e: 0xf00004ff correcting
(EE) end of block range 0xefffffff < begin 0xf00004ff
(EE) VESA(0): cannot read V_BIOS (5)
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.
Fatal server error:
no screens found
giving up.
xinit: connection reset by peer (errno 104): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error.
root@darkstar:~# _
I don't think anything else before that had anything related to why it didn't work, just stuff like the version of x (1.3.0) and that (EE) and (WW) meant error, and warning, respectively.
- I very quickly gave up googling and came running to you nice people instead.
- Oh yeah remembering some stuff from my dsl/knoppix days, I tried to get xsetup.sh or whatever it is - that's all I had to type in dsl, I don't know how to get it in slack.
Some more technicalities:- Laptop has no internet access. I'm currently on another computer, running xp unfortunately. Maybe if I can get the firewire internet connection through this computer.... that's for another day, unless it would help.
- I'm not too experienced with linux - easy terminology and instructions please.
Here's what I think may be wrong:
idea 1: I need the last install cd for x to work. If this is the case is there a way to install that last cd without doing the whole thing again?
idea 2: Something else has gone wrong. More likely, I think.
anyway thanks for reading this far, and thanks in advance if you can help me out!
-phil
after which it will write you a new /etc/X11/xorg.conf and everything should be fine.
