I installed a woody base system and then install the xserver-svga required by my nVidia GeForce3 card and a window manager. Then from a root command line I ran startx. However, all I got as a result was a black screen with speckles (not x's grey screen), with a set of blinking underlines. My guess is I was looking at a brief paragraph or sentence followed by a cursor, that recycled and lacked a proper horizontal sync.
I took a look at the /ect/X11/XF86Config file, and to my eyes it was very strange. In part perhaps because I'm familiar with the RedHat file, but there were suspicious aspects. My current configuration has a vertRefresh of 48-120 Hz, but the debian file ends up with 50-85Hz. I used "medium" level configuration, which asked me for the "best" performance of my card. I entered [EMAIL PROTECTED] (my card is capable of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hz), which was closest. And so why did the configuration reduce the horizontal refresh so drastically? Other oddities. Nowhere in the device section or elsewhere does the configuration see my nVidia card and what should be its its nv driver. Instead, the graphic card's name is generic and the driver is simply VGA2. I assumed that the nv driver was compiled in the stock 2.4.18-bf2.4 kernel. Am I wrong? How would I know? In the monitor section, there are three dozen commented lines describing all possible resolutions and refresh rates, and associated with each is an uncommented line with a "ModeLine" statement. Is this enormous mess normal in debian? Did I fail to install a needed package? Shouldn't my video card have been detected? Should I expect the debian xserver configuration to be close enough to the RedHat so that I can use one to some extent as a model for changing the other? -- Haines Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.hartford-hwp.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]