Breezy, beta 3 on Toshiba Tecra 8000

Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski emil.oppeln.bronikowski at gmail.com
Fri Aug 19 17:06:00 CDT 2005


 OK, I did a bad thing. I actually installed this over my full working
Kubuntu installation. ;-) Now I know this was kinda bad move, but hey,
progress is made out of mistakes of idiots like me. ;-)

 Installation process went smooth as always. I saw few untranslated
options in installer (btw: I've ,,proposed'' myself to
Polish-Translator group on Launchpad, but still haven't recived a word
from them. Is there any process for acceptation?), but that's not very
important right now.

 This was the first time, when I've installed Ubuntu without network.
My ,,good'' (with drivers in Linux kernel) DLink card was given away,
and all I have left was a unsupported (could be used with Ndiswrapper)
Linksys and an old ethernet/LAN card. Since I have no ethernet cable
in living room, I decited to install it without access to the
Internet.

 Hardware: Toshiba Tecra 8000, P2/400, 256 Mb. Old junk, but I like it
very much. Been runing Windows, Slackware, Debian and Ubuntu.

 As I said, installation was painless, and I even saw a WiFi card
configuration dialog, as if Linksys was detected, but I failed to
connect with my AP. I like the idea of additional progressbar. It
hides ,,bad stuff'' from regular user, while I can switch to  other
console and watch progress.

 I noticed that there's few strange strings while boot progress. Like:
hda1 not found, no /dev/cdrom, no /dev/fetchmailconfrc, no
/etc/X11/default-display-manager. I don't know is that just a bug with
my setup, or something else.

 When GDM started up I banged my head against desk. 640x480. Yes, my
laptop with its NeoMagic card don't want to display nothing in
1024x768 before custom modelines are added to xorg.conf -- you guess
right, I didn't backup my old config. I switched over to the console,
and asked dpkg-reconfigure for help. Reconfiguration  was promising,
but, even the configuration was OK (OK as looks OK, but there's still
no custom modes), I still was only able to see 640x480.

 Then I noticed something worrying. I switched my driver to VESA (it
works that way with 1024x768), but when I broken xorg.conf, warning
dialog poped up with an question, if I like to see what's wrong and
the machine ,,crashed''. It was alive, but I couldn't switch over to
console, nor kill the X-session. Power button did init 0. Then I
managed to get good resoltion, GDM started up, but after I logged in,
there was no Gnome splash screen. Just a brown screen. No error msg,
nothing. Again: I couldn't switch over to console.

 Now I'm running Breezy with VESA, and hope to find good xorg.conf for
my gfx-card over Google. Other than that (notice: my HW is old and it
should collect dust from some time now, I would assume that decent PC
would be better supported:-) I love most of changes. X.org split, new
Gnome looks a lot better, it's a first time when I'm using Software
Updates applet. Good job! Maybe I will leave Gnome for a bit more and
see if I'll manage to make it my desktop :-P

 And yes, my sound card is as silent as my broken bass guitar. But
that's normal, because it's ISA one. Nothing that modprobe couldn't
fix. :-)

-- 
 Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski, http://bronikowski.com



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