I'm impressed...
I've had Debian on Razor (my main computer) for probably a year now, dual-booting with first Win2K then WinXP. I've hardly used it. A few days ago I decided to give Gentoo a go.
I downloaded the ISO, installed, compiled everything from scratch, configured... and ended up with a blank screen when I finally rebooted after more than a day of downloading, compiling and installing stuff, not to mention scratching my head over slightly cryptic instructions on the Gentoo install guide.
After a brief try at accessing the computer using ssh (with no luck: obviously Something Bad had happened) I gave up, downloaded the latest Debian netinst ISO and reinstalled Debian.
The install went beautifully until I hit X installation. X has never liked me. The first time I installed it, on Strat (my old P133), I had to temporarily downgrade from unstable to testing to even get a working package. Of course, since Debian technically doesn't let you downgrade, I managed to royally screw up my system in the process. I did get X installed, though, after many hours of wrangling with the package system.
This time round, I ran 'apt-get install gnome', assuming that it would pull all the X stuff I needed along behind it. I was, of course, greviously mistaken - it installed about half of X, but left some critical stuff (ie: the actual X server itself) uninstalled. So I installed XFree86, and started it up, only to be greeted by an error message telling me that XKB could not find the 'pc/uk' keymap.
I scratched my head for a bit over this, then gave in and edited XF86-config4 to tell XKB to load the us keymap instead. I figured that having a few symbol keys shuffled was an acceptable tradeoff for getting a working X environment. I could always fix it later.
No such luck: even when told to use the us keymap, XKB persisted in trying to load 'pc/uk'. Gah. I went through about an hour of trying to find any additional config files which were overriding the X default, with no success, and finally decided to perform the good old Windows standby: uninstall and reinstall.
So I uninstalled X, deleted /etc/X11 to give it a clean slate on reinstall, and reinstalled. That was when things got weird. First off, I couldn't load 'startx' as a user, only as root. Once I actually got startx to work, all that loaded was a blank X display with no window manager and an xterm floating in the top right. Not good.
A second uninstall-reinstall gave the same weird results. It took another ten minutes of casting around until I managed to convince apt to totally reinstall and reconfigure the whole X/Gnome system and get things running again.
Of course, when I ran 'startx', I saw the familiar Gnome startup screen - quickly followed by the exact same error I'd been trying to fix in the first place. Gah.
This time round, I actually paid attention to what it said on the error. At the bottom, there was some advice for bug reporters - if you think this error is a bug, run this command and include its output with the bug report. I looked up the command and realised it was actually a Gnome config tool. A bit of casting around and I was looking at the offending entry in the Gnome config database, telling XKB to use the 'uk' keyboard layout. Tweaked it to read 'gb', and voila - workage!
Sigh. And I thought the Windows Registry was bad for having configuration settings in odd places...
Anyway, the upshot of it all is that I have Debian reinstalled, with the latest everything, and I'm now in a lovely clean Gnome environment which reminds me rather a lot of running Mac OS X on PC hardware, only without the silly bubbly theme and brushed metal. It even has anti-aliased font rendering, which looks fantastic: one of the major reasons I hadn't been using Linux was because text was rendering so horribly under KDE that I couldn't bear to read anything.
I even managed to use The GIMP successfully, to whip up a nice simple desktop background. It's improved an awful lot since I last used it, and it definately suits the more Mac-like simplicity of Gnome than it does KDE or Windows.
I've got Firefox and Thunderbird set up, Logjam for Livejournal, GAIM for IM - the only things I'm lacking are games and my music stuff. However, for day-to-day use they're not really all that critical.
I think I could get used to this... ^_^
[edit] Oh, by the way, Mishi, your graphics card is secure =P Auction finished at £130 with 15 real bids... o.O [/edit]
[edit, even later] I even got ALSA working nicely ^_^ Unfortunately, the reason I wanted sound working was to play MP3s. My MP3s are stored on Altair, and distributed across the network via SMB. This works beautifully on Windows, and used to work nicely on Razor's old Debian install using SMBFS. Unfortunately, that doesn't work any more: I can mount the share using smbfs, but any attempt to actually use it freezes either the program in question, or my entire X session. Thing is ... smbclient mounts it perfectly, as does Nautilus, using smb:// ... but of course, that's not much use to me, since I want to use XMMS, which can only access local files. Grr.
There are also some other odd niggles: for one, I can't shut the machine down. 'shutdown -h' actually makes the machine reboot after it's gone through shutdown, while 'reboot' does a shutdown and turns off the screen, but then just sits there. Secondly, modconf doesn't work - it's looking for /etc/modprobe.conf, which doesn't exist. And thirdly, there seem to be an awful lot of 'operation failed' messages coming up at boot - I'm guessing that for some reason drivers are being loaded for stuff that doesn't exist, or whatever. And fourthly: my (debian-packaged) kernel doesn't support FAT32 o.O [edit, later] I take that back: it *does* support it, there's just no specific 'fat32' kernel module to do so. D'oh.[/edit] [/edit]
[edit, even later] Grr. I should *not* have to spent an hour researching to figure out how to change the icon for the Wastebasket on the desktop, when all other icons can be changed easily through their preference dialog. It's the one thing that's really frustrating me about Gnome: the configuration interface is pretty awful compared to KDE. All the config applets only have the most basic options, and any more advanced options are set in obscure places... [/edit]
[edit, even *later*] Yay, SMBFS works now! Turned out I needed to upgrade the smbd on Altair o.O Weirdness. But, yay. Now I can access my MP3s ^__^ [/edit]
I downloaded the ISO, installed, compiled everything from scratch, configured... and ended up with a blank screen when I finally rebooted after more than a day of downloading, compiling and installing stuff, not to mention scratching my head over slightly cryptic instructions on the Gentoo install guide.
After a brief try at accessing the computer using ssh (with no luck: obviously Something Bad had happened) I gave up, downloaded the latest Debian netinst ISO and reinstalled Debian.
The install went beautifully until I hit X installation. X has never liked me. The first time I installed it, on Strat (my old P133), I had to temporarily downgrade from unstable to testing to even get a working package. Of course, since Debian technically doesn't let you downgrade, I managed to royally screw up my system in the process. I did get X installed, though, after many hours of wrangling with the package system.
This time round, I ran 'apt-get install gnome', assuming that it would pull all the X stuff I needed along behind it. I was, of course, greviously mistaken - it installed about half of X, but left some critical stuff (ie: the actual X server itself) uninstalled. So I installed XFree86, and started it up, only to be greeted by an error message telling me that XKB could not find the 'pc/uk' keymap.
I scratched my head for a bit over this, then gave in and edited XF86-config4 to tell XKB to load the us keymap instead. I figured that having a few symbol keys shuffled was an acceptable tradeoff for getting a working X environment. I could always fix it later.
No such luck: even when told to use the us keymap, XKB persisted in trying to load 'pc/uk'. Gah. I went through about an hour of trying to find any additional config files which were overriding the X default, with no success, and finally decided to perform the good old Windows standby: uninstall and reinstall.
So I uninstalled X, deleted /etc/X11 to give it a clean slate on reinstall, and reinstalled. That was when things got weird. First off, I couldn't load 'startx' as a user, only as root. Once I actually got startx to work, all that loaded was a blank X display with no window manager and an xterm floating in the top right. Not good.
A second uninstall-reinstall gave the same weird results. It took another ten minutes of casting around until I managed to convince apt to totally reinstall and reconfigure the whole X/Gnome system and get things running again.
Of course, when I ran 'startx', I saw the familiar Gnome startup screen - quickly followed by the exact same error I'd been trying to fix in the first place. Gah.
This time round, I actually paid attention to what it said on the error. At the bottom, there was some advice for bug reporters - if you think this error is a bug, run this command and include its output with the bug report. I looked up the command and realised it was actually a Gnome config tool. A bit of casting around and I was looking at the offending entry in the Gnome config database, telling XKB to use the 'uk' keyboard layout. Tweaked it to read 'gb', and voila - workage!
Sigh. And I thought the Windows Registry was bad for having configuration settings in odd places...
Anyway, the upshot of it all is that I have Debian reinstalled, with the latest everything, and I'm now in a lovely clean Gnome environment which reminds me rather a lot of running Mac OS X on PC hardware, only without the silly bubbly theme and brushed metal. It even has anti-aliased font rendering, which looks fantastic: one of the major reasons I hadn't been using Linux was because text was rendering so horribly under KDE that I couldn't bear to read anything.
I even managed to use The GIMP successfully, to whip up a nice simple desktop background. It's improved an awful lot since I last used it, and it definately suits the more Mac-like simplicity of Gnome than it does KDE or Windows.
I've got Firefox and Thunderbird set up, Logjam for Livejournal, GAIM for IM - the only things I'm lacking are games and my music stuff. However, for day-to-day use they're not really all that critical.
I think I could get used to this... ^_^
[edit] Oh, by the way, Mishi, your graphics card is secure =P Auction finished at £130 with 15 real bids... o.O [/edit]
[edit, even later] I even got ALSA working nicely ^_^ Unfortunately, the reason I wanted sound working was to play MP3s. My MP3s are stored on Altair, and distributed across the network via SMB. This works beautifully on Windows, and used to work nicely on Razor's old Debian install using SMBFS. Unfortunately, that doesn't work any more: I can mount the share using smbfs, but any attempt to actually use it freezes either the program in question, or my entire X session. Thing is ... smbclient mounts it perfectly, as does Nautilus, using smb:// ... but of course, that's not much use to me, since I want to use XMMS, which can only access local files. Grr.
There are also some other odd niggles: for one, I can't shut the machine down. 'shutdown -h' actually makes the machine reboot after it's gone through shutdown, while 'reboot' does a shutdown and turns off the screen, but then just sits there. Secondly, modconf doesn't work - it's looking for /etc/modprobe.conf, which doesn't exist. And thirdly, there seem to be an awful lot of 'operation failed' messages coming up at boot - I'm guessing that for some reason drivers are being loaded for stuff that doesn't exist, or whatever. And fourthly: my (debian-packaged) kernel doesn't support FAT32 o.O [edit, later] I take that back: it *does* support it, there's just no specific 'fat32' kernel module to do so. D'oh.[/edit] [/edit]
[edit, even later] Grr. I should *not* have to spent an hour researching to figure out how to change the icon for the Wastebasket on the desktop, when all other icons can be changed easily through their preference dialog. It's the one thing that's really frustrating me about Gnome: the configuration interface is pretty awful compared to KDE. All the config applets only have the most basic options, and any more advanced options are set in obscure places... [/edit]
[edit, even *later*] Yay, SMBFS works now! Turned out I needed to upgrade the smbd on Altair o.O Weirdness. But, yay. Now I can access my MP3s ^__^ [/edit]