[Sussex] Dominic's Laptop

[Geoff Teale]

Chaps,

Just for those that were involved in setting up Dominic's laptop, here's
what we had to do to get XFree86 running (it was a lot tougher than it is
going to sound, mainly because it took a while to work out what was missing
from the machine based on XFree86 error messages).  Really Dom's problems
came down to three things:

1\ The very clean, minimal build Steve did on the laptop, followed by Dom
pulling XFree86 and KDE did not install everything needed to get XFree86 to
run on any machine.

2\ Dom hadn't set up the sync speed within an acceptable range for a TFT
screen.

3\ The 'nv' Open Source Nvidia driver does not support the mobile GeForce 2
Go (?) card in Dom's laptop.

In short we needed to:

apt-get install xfonts-base
apt-get install xftts
apt-get install wget (not essential, but I wanted it so I could...)
wget <url for NVidia's closed source drivers>
tar -xzvf <NVidia tarballs>
cd <NVidia directory>
make install

vi /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

In XF86Config-4 we had to :

Change Horizontal Sync to 35-70.
Change Vertical Sync to 60.
Change the driver from 'nv' to 'Nvidia'
Comment out a couple of 'load' statements (I forget which - it's in the
Nvidia README).

Once that was done we simply (simply, at least once we had worked out
Debian's structure under /etc) set NVDriver to be inserted at boot time.

After all that we got a lovely kde2 desktop very shortly after doing a
startx.

That little lot took nearly 3 hours of fiddling to get done.  A couple of
wild goose chases and some teasing glimpses of the NVidia splash screen and
then finally a working desktop some time around midnight Friday.

-- 
GJT
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk




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