Fox

Hi everyone,

I recently bought a Dell Latitude C600 off craigslist from an engineering TA for 20 bucks. Specs are:

PIII 1GHz (coppermine core)
256mb RAM
30GB Hard drive
ATi Rage Mobility M3 graphics card

After deleting all his crap and zeroing the free space, I resized the windows partition, and my friend helped me through a networked installation of Debian etch. The time came to configure the graphics hardware, and I changed the default values of 1024x768, 16 bit color, to the LCD panel's native resolution of 1400x1050, and 24 bit color. The machine freaked out, and the LCD basically looked like the pixels did whatever they wanted to. I would compare this look to a mood ring- it had that sort of slow trippyness that seems unnatural for anything digital. Anyway, we got through this somehow- I think the command was something like gdm-reconfigure, or dpkg-reconfigure or something like that. I was pretty happy with it until just recently, when I tried to get my wireless adapter working. Debian had some serious issue with ndiswrapper's modprobe, and the adapter somehow never got published as a network interface.

So last night, I downloaded all the SuSE CDs, and did an installation of that. It resized my Windows partition, killing it (boots to windows loading screen and restarts without a visible error), and is now giving me the same display problem that Debian gave me- when running it in 1024x768, it doesn't crash, but has glitching on the right side, sort of like a window blind effect. The border in the middle glitches at about the refresh rate. To the far right is what should be displayed, and in between is a mirror of the other side of the screen. Sorry for the long-winded explanation, but suffice it to say, there's something seriously wrong with it in general. Trying to run it at 1400x kills it dead- control+alt+backspace doesn't do anything, and switching terminals doesn't help. Interestingly enough, if I switch to, say, tty2 or 3 before X has a chance to load, the system doesn't go down.

Sorry for the long post, but I'm really hoping someone might have seen this before and can make a suggestion.

Thanks in advance!

-Tony

TheMatt

Hi Tony,

What driver did you use when you reconfigured the Xserver?

Type this in to the console:
After you autodetect hardware, it will ask for a graphics driver. First, try the ATI driver.



If that doesn't work, then try the Vesa driver.



When you go through the wizard, if you don't know which option to select on a screen, just leave the default.

Fox

Thanks a lot- turns out it's the same command my friend had me use when he helped me get Debian on originally. Worked like a charm.

I'll have to tweak it a bit, since the wireless (the reason I installed it in the first place) doesn't work yet. The driver installed, and it detected it properly (AX111), but it doesn't show up in iwconfig. Interestingly enough, though, there's an entry in there for sit0. I'll have to fool around with it for a bit while I'm putting Xubuntu-alternate on an old gateway. That's a whole other story, involving GRUB being installed to the MBR and me deciding on a whim to get rid of RH9.

I'll update once I get that sorted. Thanks again for the help!

TheMatt

No problem.

You will probably have to install ndiswrapper. This is used to 'wrap' windows drivers in Linux. What wireless card is it?

Fox

It's a TRENDnet TEW-421PC, which I've been told uses the AX111 driver.

I'm going to nuke the SuSE install tonight, along with everything under the windows partition (after I back it up) and start over tomorrow. Hopefully then, I'll have better luck with the font sizes and everything.

I might try Debian sarge instead of etch- the networked install was an older version than was available at the time, because my university actually has one of the official install servers, and unfortunately they don't keep it as up to date as I would have liked.

I'll have to install Firefox from source, but at least 'make' and gcc will probably work on that. They had some problems on my install of etch.

Side problem/solution:

I got a GRUB error 18 when I installed Xubuntu on the aforementioned Gateway. I didn't really feel like messing with it anymore, so I did a fixmbr from the windows recovery console, and set the NTFS partition as active. Windows works now, but I'm sort of disappointed in the machine for not playing nice with GRUB.