Oh man, what a fun time.
So after dealing with a terribly slow PC after my just somewhat slow PC died a few months back, I finally found a semi-cheap PC to replace it. It’s certainly not a monster of a PC, but it runs pretty much everything I want it to just fine. Sadly, getting Linux to run on it has been an absolute chore.
First, this thing came preinstalled with Windows Vista, which isn’t the best OS in the world, I can tell you. Still, on this computer with 4GB of RAM and a quad core Phenom, it at least runs okay. The issue is that being a modern off-the-shelf PC, it did not come with an actual installer CD for the OS. It instead comes with a sort of “restore from scratch” boot function, using a custom partition with images of everything from scratch. This unfortunately means that I have to throw everything onto one massive C drive instead of reinstalling plain Vista on a smaller partition… unless, of course, I could use gparted to shrink that partition.
Trying that turned out to be a horrible idea.
Running gparted was successful; however, rebooting put me on a “repairing Vista” screen that just sat there for hours with no disk activity save for about 5 minutes at the beginning of the process. Trying to fix it from a Linux boot CD was unsuccessful as well, and every boot after that threw me back to the unfortunate uncancellable “repairing Vista” screen.
So I activated the repair mode at boot, and hoped against hope that the repair would use the existing resized partition, at least (and would somehow fix that partition as well). No luck, though — the repair truly took the system back to its initial state, with Vista installed on a partition that filled the entire drive. So at that point, I was somewhat stuck. My only real option was to try Ubuntu’s Wubi installer to give me a Linux partition inside Windows. Its max size being only 30GB was kind of a downer, but undeterred, I pressed on.
It worked, and Ubuntu seemed to have everything working just fine, including sound and 3d. Disliking Gnome, however, meant that I had to do some serious tweaking. This is when new trouble began.
I changed the oddly minimalist xorg.conf file to use a smaller screen than the nearly unreadable default of 1600×1200 (on my monitor, and especially with my aging eyes) and the proper refresh rates for my monitor. When I started X, however, the screen didn’t fill the monitor size, it was stuck at 60Hz, and I had no 3d. Trying to fix it, I eventually screwed things up bad enough where X wouldn’t even start. It was time to remove Ubuntu and start anew.
After reinstalling, I was more careful to not change anything that was not necessary, but unfortunately the same result happened. A search of Google, as before, was mostly unenlightening as to the exact cause, though I had seen some hints to some configurations not working with Ubuntu’s provided drivers. I had thought nothing of that, since, when Gnome and gdm was running by default, things were working just fine.
So for the heck of it, I removed xorg-driver-fglrx, installed the kernel headers, and — and as I removed xorg-driver-fglrx I noticed apt recommended I remove some other “unneeded” things as well, including an unknown package called dkms. Looking at the specifics, it was apparently something to help automate driver detection for Ubuntu. Knowing that would probably be a thorn in my side for where I was heading, that got removed as well.
Running off to ATI’s site for drivers, I got the latest ones for my Radeon and ran them. Without even having to change my xorg.conf configuration that I had tweaked to a much more traditional format during my trials with Ubuntu’s fglrx driver, startx now brought up a working, 3d-enabled screen. Finally.
No sound, however, but that was easily fixed by adding my user to the audio group. One has to wonder what kind of voodoo magic Ubuntu does behind the scenes to set all of this up. It boggles my mind at how much modern Linux distros automate just to save people from a few simple configuration edits.
So now that I’m back in business, I seriously hope to get back to this blogging thing here. There’s not much to talk about when you’re using Debian on an ancient, crippled, nearly useless computer.