Fixing Debian GUI: Cheating
When I finally installed the new processor and realised that one of my sticks of RAM was bad, I was then faced with updating my installation of Debian.
So, I happily apt-get updated and apt-get upgraded and…
Got a new kernel.
So rebooted.
Noticed lots of error messages.
Noticed that my wireless card wasn’t coming up.
Realised I was booting into console mode as X server wasn’t configured right.
I tried dpkg-reconfigure but that didn’t work.
I tried apt-get dist-upgrade but still problems.
Note, when I booted into the old kernel the wireless card worked and it didn’t have all the fatal errors with other modules not loading…but still no GUI.
I tried asking for help on #debian.
I figured oh well until I had time let me try a new OS as I always meant to…Fedora Core 5 in spite of being told FC6 was coming out in 2 days. I wasn’t going to overwrite Debian…what’s the point in that? How would I learn, right?
But FC was being too stressful…downloading all those updates. I realize I dont have patience for non-Debian based distros.
So I reinstalled Knoppix (FC was trying to overwrite the Knoppix install). I updated, upgraded and dist-upgraded my Knoppix.
And then…I mounted my Debian root partition and copied /etc/X11/xorg.conf from Knoppix to Debian and fixed Grub to see Debian and not just Knoppix.
And…I had a GUI!
Still no wireless and still loads of errors but GUI!
It was a weird GUI because of course I think it was thinking it had all the Window Managers that come with Knoppix so I got logged into a failsafe terminal and then…installed fluxbox and aptitude.
Then I copied all the installes from Knoppix downloading and previous Debian downloading (maybe this is bad) and did an aptitude upgrade which…proceeded to uninstall stuff. It didn’t install stuff. I was confused. So I reinstalled udev and rebooted and then did an aptitude dist-upgrade which installed stuff. Of course, for some reason my ethernet card isn’t getting an IP address by DHCP but…I was able to manually input one and connect to the internet (as I’m using the box right now to post this). Lots of errors still but at least one problem sorta solved…I have a GUI and am now install gnome.
Later on I will try to figure out what’s up with the kernel. Maybe I should reinstall it or something. After I stop getting those errors then maybe I’ll see about the wireless…or maybe find the config stuff that keeps loading my wireless module.
I don’t know…
But my sister agrees that copying Knoppix’s xorg.config to Debian is cheating. Yes…she understood enough of my woes to get that.
What next!
Class!
