Debian 3.0r1 installation problems (reposted)

[akshoslaa]

OK I'll try that again... now with descriptive subject title :)

(Previously posted under "OK I give Up... Need Newbie Help")
***

I usually steer clear of any type of 'tech support'. In a Windows environment, I _AM_ Tech support, I don't need help. But thi is Linux. After much hair pulling I've decided to bite the bullet and ask.

Here goes... I've been trying to get Linux (Debian 3.0r1) installed for about 3 weeks now.
The installation is fine, It installs, and I get the command prompt. After much booting back and forth between Debian and XP (Multiboot) I finnaly managed to learn enough about the Linux command line to make some progress...

However

Currently all I've got is a command line, that as yet, isn't particularly usefull. I quite like the idea of piping various commands from tool to tool, to format output, but apparently I told it the wrong keyboard type and the '|' comes up as '~' (the '~' key just beeps)

Furthermore I'm completely lost with setting up the modem. I discovered quickly that mine is one of the dreaded 'winmodems' and have as yet been unable to find a linmodem driver for it. (PCI, D-Link HCF P85, Coexant, Vendor:14F1 Dev:1035) I found one from Linuxant.com (spelling?) but have had no luck installing it given it's RPM format, that as far as I can tell, the Debian release I'm using doesn't use RPM.

No drama though, I dug out my old 33.6 external and hooked that up. Tested it under XP, no problems. Then rebooted in Linux and tried setting it up there. The best I managed was one of the moden setup programs detected it (can't remember which one though, tried too many. It was a blue, menu driven thing that called the connection 'provider' if that helps)
As yet I can't figure out how to get the moden up and running... (ie so It connects/ I can connect it when I try and view online content, or try and update from a URL or some such)

The reasonI've been trying to get the moden up and running is because I'm running an NVIDIA GF4 MX 440 video card. I went (under XP) to the NVIDIA site, and got their latest linux drivers (NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run) I can run this one, but it asks me go go online to check for a precompiled kernal, or to recompile manually. *blinks like a startled cow* I as yet can't get online. And wouldn't have a clue as to how to recompile my kernal. Everything I've read simply tells me to 'install the kernal source from the distribution CD then type this and run that' and so on. I might be able to do and of this if I knew _how_ to install from the CD... period. All I've maneged to figure out is tasksel. I can run dselect but, umm... yeah. A tad confusing. As of yet all I've managed to get apt-get to do is tell me everything's fine.

The reason I've been trying to get my video card working properly is obviously so I can use 'X'. after much fiddling with xf86config I finaly managed to get it to load, rather than saying 'fatal error, no screens found' (which I discovered meant it didn't know what my video card was) At one point it started telling me that there wasn't enough video ram to set the desired resolution. 64M*1024=65536K I'm not going crazy right? That's what I entered for video ram. Somewhere in the scrolls of text before x it says I've got 64K, but It asks for the figure in K, so... *looks confused again*

I've managed to get x to run. It runs at 256 colours with a resolution in the ballpark of 320*200 with the top inch or so of the screen being black. As yet I can't fix any of this. Furthermore, since getting x to run in the firstplace. Debian boots to a GUI verion of the login prompt. Except at that resolution the prompt itself is off the screen, and once I log in it takes me straight to X (KDM I think). From there I managed to find a console where I could run xf86config. I set the vidio to something that didn't work and rebooted. Now when I start linux the screen blanks out a few times trying to load the gui before giving up and giving me the text command line. NVIDIA-Readme says to modify my runlevel in /etc/inittab to stop it trying to load X. But that's as much info as it gives, so I'm still stuck.

Oh yeah, Is there an easier to use Command Line Text Editor than VI that I haven't found? I didn't like VI way back when they made me do a few hours of ANSI C under pure UNIX (now completely forgotten). And I still don't like it. I'm convinced it stands for Very Irritating. I've been using lynx to view text and html files. (off a FAT 32 partition I mounted, so I can download from windows and view under Linux.) The help file for it mention editing, but I haven't figured it out.

I realise this is alot to digest at once... but this is starting to drive me nuts. I'm going around in circles and getting generally sick of the whole idea. A freind told me to try red-hat instead but I only have Debian atm.

I installed Debian as something new to learn, aswell as somethin to tinker with, as my computer is always kept running a little too well. There's never anything wrong that needs fixing, so I installed Linux to change that. (sorry if that sounds a little 'anti-linux' but I assumed that by installing a multiboot OS that I know absolutely nothing about I'd run into a few problems. Guess I was right)

Any help greatly appriciated.

Oh, one more thing. I have absolutely no objection to reformatting and starting from scratch. (I am used to Windows after all :P)

Thanks
-Scott

[plattypus1]

Check your PM box, I sent you some answers when I noticed your thread was locked. :-)

[akshoslaa]

:PM from plattypus1
>>As for your modem drivers, look for something in .tar.gz format, that'll be distro-independent.
>>RPM is considered to work only for RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, and other RPM-based distributions.

OK then... got a tar.gz version, and upon reading through the installation instrctions (http://www.linuxant.com/drivers/hcf/install.html)I found...

***
METHOD C: TAR PACKAGE (*.tar.gz)

If you have obtained the driver package in tar format:

1. extract the package with "tar -xzf hcfpcimodem-{version}.tar.gz"
("tar -xzf hcfusbmodem-{version}.tar.gz" for the USB version)

2. change to the package directory with "cd hcfpcimodem-{version}"
("cd hcfusbmodem-{version}" for the USB version)

3. run "make install" from the top of the package directory.
(Debian users might need to change the KERNELSRC definition in
modules/common.mak first)

4. run "hcfpciconfig" ("hcfusbconfig" for the USB version) to complete
the installation and configure your modem.
***

a couple of questions before I set about rebooting... (and thereby lose the ability to ask questions till I get back to windows)

Step 3, "make install" - Will this work? As far as I know I haven't installed any specific source (ie Kernal) or compilers. Does Linux do this without them?

And "change the KERNALSRC definition inmodules/common.mak"? Change it to what?

You probably hear this alot... but from the perspective of a Vetran Windows user... Linux is confusing :)

[o0zi]

If you haven't got any kernel source or compilers, then you can't compile the drivers. If no compiling has to be done and "make install" is just copying the files to the correct places, then you should be fine.

If you want to get onto the CD, then you have to "mount" it. If your CD was on /dev/cdrom (which it probably is), then you'd type:

mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

Then go to the /mnt/cdrom directory and access the CD from there.

Not trying to start a flame war, but Debian isn't the best distro for someone new from Windows - perhaps SuSe, Mandrake or Red-Hat would be easier for you.

[plattypus1]

You should be okay. It sounds like a binary package, so just do "make install" and if it returns errors, come back.

[sharth]

text editor, nano should be installed.

but apt-get install jed pico vim emacs or ed, with my recommendation being jed.

use the nv driver for your x config (dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86)

[nothingbutlinux]

I dunno, I guess I'm lazy. I've installed Debian both from the standard Debian CDs and using Knoppix, and I'll never install with the standard CDs again. You mentioned your motive for installing this way is educational, and that's fine, you will learn a lot more, but you're going to have to do everything by hand. This link (http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2016) was VERY helpful to me when installing from the Debian CDs. It's a bit outdated, but it will give you valuable help.

The problems you're seeing, winmodems and the dreaded "fatal error, no screens found" are probably the toughest you'll face with the install. Getting past the no screens error is an achievment, something you should be proud of! If you follow through the walk-through link above, it will have you load a Window Manager as the next step. When you get to that point, you're almost home with a working install. Unfortunately, using Debian 3 also means it's a very OUTDATED install. You'll have kernel 2.2, KDE 2.something (if you install it with "apt-get install kde"), Mozilla 1.0, etc. What you WONT have are a lot of unwanted aps, your install will be very clean.

Which brings me to Knoppix. It sounds like you're getting pretty frustrated, and I'd rather see you use Knoppix than give up. If you have a high-speed connection and a CD burner, you can download it from here. (http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=44) Type "knx-hdinstall" from a console window in SU mode to start the install script. There is no SU password in Knoppix, just leave it blank. I also have an nVidia card, and to get Knoppix to boot from CD I had to type "knoppix xmodule=nv" from the opening command prompt. You may or may not have to do that.

Good luck!

[akshoslaa]

Alrighty then... here's what I've been up to...

I fiddled about for a while, trying the defaultrunlevel thing... no luck. So gave up and re-installed (5-6th time so far... Like I said, I'm used to Windows so re-installing isn't that much of an issue)

With this re-installation I had the chance to pick the US layout keyboard (I'm use to picking UK for dictionaries and the like) so the '|' works now. That's a start.

Secondly, as I'd given up on the winmodem for the time being, and hooked up the 33.6 external, The installation was able to detect a modem for a change and connect to ftp... another impovement. (See... I'm making progress *cheers*)

However... I made the mistake of letting it get the security updates... On a 33.6, it was (at full speed) goin to take about 8 and a half hours. My Dial up D/C's after 5 hours...

So I fiddled around a bit more and tryed to get it to bypass the security updates... no luck... couldn't figure out how... so re-installed... again.

This time I did everything the same except for the security updates, and all went well... untill I decided to try the NV drivers again. I'd tried them several times before, but with no luck. (They only support up to GF3, and according to some other forum (I've read many) they don't support GL. Don't really mind at this point but But regardless, they still don't support GF4.)

So I tried them again, and as usual... no screens found. So OK xf86config go through all the options again till I get to video cards... As an Idea I had a look through the database for Generic VGA or similar, and lo and behold there it was. Told X to use that and ran startx again... but once more no screens found... except it still says it's trying the NV drivers. So currently I have no Idea on that one.

I tried running the nVidia install again and once more it got the the whole kernal thing, where it comes up with an error about not finding the default compiler etc. I installed gcc from tasksel but I'm assuming theres some config file somewhere that I have to point to it, but I have no idea. It also complained about the kernal source, so after much looking about the random howto guides and readme files I've downloaded I found some places to look, but none of the directories it mentioned even existed.

I tried looking on th CD, and found a source directory, but it didn't seem to contain anything usefull. It would help if I knew what I was looking for.

I also tried connecting to te net again... firstly pon dialed, reached my isp, who promptly said no and disconnected me. I'm assuming some error in my setup. So I tried wvdial which detected the modem, and after it threw an error about /dev/modem at me I changed the reference it was talking about to /dev/ttyS0 (modem in com1). Tried again, it dieled, and connected, came up with two status messages (don't remember what) then just sat there. After a few minutres I got sick of that and hit [ctrl]+c it said something about trying to exit gracefully and went back to the prompt. The modem however didn't disconnect properly and I had to turn it off. When turning it back on however the status lights PW and TR stayed on (usually just PW is on when the modem's not in use.) Again... no idea.


The verdict, after two more re-installs, I'm still stuck at the command prompt. (I was at one point able to get into kdm but the resolution was unuseable (dialog boxes were bigger than the screen size) I managed to connect but didn't achieve anything usefull with it. And still can't find my kernal source... and even if I could I wouldn't know what to do with it.

I knew before I even got hold of Debian it has a certain reputation when it comes to Linux Newbies. But it was free and easily obtainable. I'd probably be much better off starting with Red-Hat, and I know someone whose got the CD's, the problem is getting hold of them. (Hard to track down owner)

But I'm learning alot as I go along, and haven't given up utterly, so I'm taking this as a good sign. I seem to be making some, admittedly slow progress but as long as I'm still learning then all is well. It'd just be so much easier if I could look for help while I'm in Linux, rather than having to reboot back to windows and try and remember all my errors.

*gives you all virtual chocolate for being helpfull*
Thanks

[o0zi]

If you want to get into X, try typing this at the console:

XFree86 -configure

Then run the command it tells you to - it autoconfigures a XF86Config file for you.

Or run the xf86config command, and select the "vesa" driver, which should definitely work.

The NV drivers do support GeForce 4. There are two Nvidia drivers - X comes with some, and Nvidia have official ones. You only need the official ones if you want to play games or use some graphics-intensive applications, but usually the X drivers should be fine.
You might have an old version of X (most likely in Debian's case), in which case you should get the newer version.

Try Knoppix - it's Debian with better hardware support, auto-detection and newer packages.

[akshoslaa]

The list of supportede cards that comes up whith the no screens found error stops at GF3, but I'm assuming since everyone has been saying my kernal is outdated that the nv drivers include GF4 in a newer kernal...

I'll be be working on that next following the walkthrough suggested by nothingbutlinux (thanks, that author also has an article for geting the kernal source and recompiling. So my luck should improve from here... I hope)

But before that, I'll try out those ideas for getting x up and running properly. As for Knoppix, Red-hat etc... I'd try them, but I don't have them. And over a 56k modem... I don't relish the download. (Also no credit card rules out online shopping, and my area doesn't exacly have a handy linux distributor down the road. I got debian of the cover of a magazine.)

Thanks

[nothingbutlinux]

I've already downloaded the latest Knoppix ISO so I could easily burn a copy and mail it to you, if you're interested. Downloading a 694 meg image over 56K isn't my idea of a good time either. Give me your address in a private message and I'd be happy to do that.