I have just (4 times so far) installed Debian 2.1 on a PentiumII 400 with
128M Ram and an S3 ViRGE/GX2 video card. There are, however, a couple of
problems.
(1) After loading X windows with startx the windows are generated as
expected and everything runs as it should for a minute or two but the
everything locks solid-- usually a few seconds after a new process is
started in an xterm. Everything locks up: keyboard does nothing (not even
ctrl-alt-delete) and even the off switch does nothing; sometimes the mouse
moves but with non-functional buttons, and sometimes it too is locked
solid. The only way to get it to go again is with the reset button and
this takes a long time with the forced fsck each time on a biggish 6.4G disk.
(2) Probably a result of the above difficulty: when I first installed
Deb2.1 I thought I would try xdm which promptly locked the screen as above.
Further, every time I tried to reboot, I ended up with a locked login
screen-- frustrating when you are a novice who really doesn't know what he
is doing! After reinstalling and editing Debian's default xinit file using
the suggested one in Welsh & Kaufman's Running Linux, the automatic lockup
has stopped (I now use startx if I want to see a locked screen) but I still
rather fancy the idea of an automatic boot into X windows.
Everything works fine in character mode so the base system seems fine.
When I bought the machine it was loaded with Caldera 1.3 which worked well
in KDE, Afterstep, fvwm2, and twm, but did have a similar problem with
olvwm. On the new installation I have tried olvwm, olwm, fvwm2, fvwm,
icewm, and scwm-- each time the same sort of lockup. So far I have not
been able to find any sort of log file that can tell me what happened; but
one xterm once popped up the following message before everything locked:
bash-2.01$ xterm: fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe) or KillClient on X server
":0.0"
If anyone can help I should be most grateful.
Regards,
Doug.
