getting xorg working on an old box .....

Dear Debianists,

Thank you for all your responses concerning the xorg problem on my old
box. I have spent one further session trying to get xorg working on the box
since I originally made the first posting.

At that stage the advice was to try to find an error serious enough to
explain the crash I had observed. Unfortunately when I returned to the box
to look for the error I found that the older Xorg log files had not been
stored. The two ones present were from runs where I had terminated them
before they could generate any errors.

It took absolutely centuries to run it again before I could generate a log
file and even then all I got was another flaky AIGLX screen 0 is not DRI
compatible error again. It was also very hard to kill the Xorg off once it
was initiated if you wanted to change the configuration parameters and see
if it might then work.

Doing control alt delete was better than doing the control C and control Y
woody woodpecker key tap routine. But if you did the control alt delete
thing too much it would reboot the entire machine. It also got harder to
kill it if you left it running for too long. It took a lot of skill and
farting around to get this to work in a routine predictable way. Eventually
I got it to do this reasonably.

I gave up on the idea of varying input parameters and then running it for
centuries until it would eventually write an error file that I could look
at. This was just too slow a proposition. You might as well use an abacus.

So what I did was just to vary the input parameters in reconfigure mode and
then run it and kill it as fast and effectively as I could after it had been
given enough time to have a chance of working properly if it looked it was
going to. I always did runs using the ATI Mach 64 graphics card driver.

I had not seen the posting by Mirco Piccin at that stage which suggested
using the VESA driver option. I will try this when I next get a chance to
work on this box again. What I found was that runs got a little less
hopeless looking if you reduced the resolution to 640 x 480 as Mirco Pirrin
reported on his old box and put the colour depth to 1. But it never fired
up properly. It just produced an image on the screen that looked sort of OK
while it struggled to fire up for ages and ages and ages..........

So I gave up with it.

I am going to try again with the VESA driver as I mentioned above. But I do
have a few more questions about all of this before I go away.

Some could be dumb but I need to ask them based on the new postings.

1.In one posting it was suggested that if Xorg doesn't work when you fire up
xdm or kdm or gdm then it doesn't matter; you can simply not use them. I
assume this means you could type in startx instead at the command prompt and
then you could fire up e.g. gnome it would work.... Is this true? Can gnome
work it Xorg fails? Or is gnome dependent on xorg to work?

2.In an earlier posting it was suggested that I could use gnome core instead
of gnome to save on memory and cpu effort etc on the old box. What features
do you get with only gnome core?

3.It was suggested that I get rid of gdm by entering # dpkg -P gdm and then
# apt-get clean. What about doing # aptitude remove gdm? Is this equivalent
here?

4.It was also suggested in the same posting that I install
xserver-xorg-core, xserver-xorg-input-all and xserver-xorg-video-all. Would
I have to do aptiude remove xorg first and then install these packages one
by one if I tried this? What is the advantage of doing this over the xorg
installation you get from the desktop choice in Etch?

5.It was also suggested that I use e.g. fluxbox or icewm etc. I did use
xfce64 before on this box when I had Sarge on it. But it was a bit pesky
not having a floppy icon etc. I didn't want to have to use command line
stuff there. Also it was a pain figuring out how to configure the printer
using xfce64 relative to gnome. Also Etch has gutenprint on it that has a
driver specific for the Epson printer I use which is cool.

6.The posting mentioned above also talked about changing the xinitrc file
contents. What is the philosophy behind this?

Your comments on this are appreciated. I have another slightly younger box
in my sights where I work.

Regards

Michael Fothergill

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