On Monday 12 November 2001 12:52 pm, nate wrote: > Mark Seven Smith said: > [..] > > > how can I install Debian on my second drive, without > > having to go through the install procedure (which is > > incompatible in *text mode* with my video card)? > > [..] > > > cable modem, ATI Rage 128 video card > > i can't imagine an ati rage 128 not working with the > debian installer. sure it most likely will not work with > xfree 3.3.6 but the installer is just VGA 16colors. if > you can see the bios and stuff on the screen as the > machine boots the installer should work.
Yes, I can see the boot stuff; but even when I d/l the "Woody" version of the installer (as per the instructions on the www.debian.org site) and try to run that; it still has a very peculiar problem: when scrolling through lists, sometimes for no reason at all, the entire computer locks up--I have to reboot! I can reboot using the RESET button on the computer's case; but I cannot reboot using ctrl-alt-delete. It is so weird; the installer begins, and then I choose the keyboard & language & etc. all the usual stuff; although I can get the very first screen to bomb the system by scrolling one point past the end of the install HELP screen (the one that tells about the Debian project). At the end of the screen, there isn't anything to necessarily tell you that you cannot scroll any further; and if you hit the down-arrow key, or the page-down key, a black line of nothing appears horizontally across the screen, as if a carriage return had been performed in the lo-res graphics (the gray background of the installer display), and there's a solid block sometimes, like it is the prompt, yet you cannot get it to move at all. The mouse won't work, and the keyboard keys won't do anything; you cannot even switch to another virtual consol using control-alt-F1 or anything like that. I suspected the keyboard; so I switched that out. Still the problem persisted. I suspected the RAM; but diagnostics seem to run fine; and I am using the same 256MB right now. I suspected another peripheral getting in the way; so I removed all the cards: the ethernet D-Link card, the SoundBlaster card, and the floppy drive, the other hard drive; all I had was the CPU, the power supply, the motherboard+RAM, the cdrom with the install files, and the HD. Still, the same problems. I could never get past where the MODULES are chosen; it seems that since everything is list-driven, it is inevitable I would hit the end of a list and try to scroll past the end, no matter how careful I was! I even took to writing down every single item on each list, so that I would be able to grab only the things I needed, and never scroll past the last item I needed; and still, it would bomb, sometimes as soon as I chose something, or when I simply hit the down arrow ONCE, in order to retrieve things not displayed. WHY I BELIEVE THE VIDEO CARD IS AT FAULT: Basically, Red Hat Linux 6.1 also had this problem--I had to get RH7.1 (with the newer XFree86 stuff on it) before I could install. I am using RH7.1 right now. Also, the ATI Rage 128 card is not listed in the hardware compatibility list on the Debian site. It still seems *VERY ODD* that the ATI Rage 128 will not work in the lowest of text video compatibility modes. I Suppose this is why the stupid card was foisted on me in the first place (I had gone to purchase a different card, but was given this one instead, "at a discount", and they assured me that it was "fully compatible with Linux"!) Now I read at various places around the web, all the difficulties folks have had with the ATI Rage 128 card. Oh well...! :-) So: isn't there a way to perhaps, "put the parts in place", the way they do with SlackWare? I am almost ready to go with SlackWare, but I would rather use Debian! Thanks in advance for any ideas... --Mark Seven Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED]
