Remember Emily LaTella

Remember Emily LaTella, one of the Gilda Radner characters from “Saturday Night Live”? Her catch phrase was simple and apt - “If it’s not one thing it’s another.” I could swear she’s been looking over my shoulder with the glee of a proven theory all week.

Sunday evening at 6:00, I started the install for the first distro of Distro II. What I hadn’t told you in the previous week was that I was planning a surprise for this round, something I hadn’t been able to accomplish in the first round: a Debian review. Armed with Hungry Minds’ 658-page tome “Debian GNU/Linux Bible”, I was sure I had this thing licked. I was also armed with the resolve that I wouldn’t publish Monday’s Penguin Shell issue until I could write that the first review in Distro II was, in fact, Debian. There’s nothing like a little internal pressure to force focus.

Everything was going well until I tried to configure the network. No luck. “No big deal,” I thought. I had all the apps I needed on CD. I’d get the rest of the install done, configure the network and apt-get to upgrade to Woody, the current “testing” version of Deb. I pushed forward, working my way through the install process like the man with a mission I was.

Then, true to form, I couldn’t get Deb to fire off an X server at anything better than 16-color, 640×480. This wasn’t good. With the resolve of a miner heeding the death of the canary, I pushed forward. I’ve had experience with XF86Config … “I can still get this done.”

Probe, no probe, one x-server mod, then another. Mysterious error messages that lead me down dead alleys: “I810_GTT_FALLBACK.” Starting the install process again to find what, initially, I could have missed. Documenting each step. Reinstalling and reconfiguring device drivers. Seeing, an hour later, the same messages. Reconfiguring XF86Config. By midnight, I’d set the pen down, leaving any notion of documenting the full process by the wayside. By 3:00 a.m., I’d had enough.

Monday, I again started in at 6:00 p.m. I’d spent part of the day scouring the newsgroups looking for any clue that would point me in a productive direction. I had a handful of potential answers and a few hours to wrap this up. With a dogged resolve, I dug in.

Flash forward to 3:00 a.m. Tuesday morning. If I’d have taken a webcam shot, I’d likely have entered Tuesday with many, many less subscribers. I’m sure the maniacal feelings showed on my face as I called it quits for the second unsuccessful night.

Tuesday at noon, I decided maybe this Debian “surprise” wasn’t such a great idea. Let’s do Lycoris, as promised, all pride aside. Maybe I’d just figure it out quietly and do Deb later on.

I walked through the Lycoris install without a problem. That is, right up to the “startx” command. Again, no X Window. Uh-oh. I could feel the frustration rising just from looking at the console. It’s not that I dislike consoles. In fact, I quite like them. It’s just that those blocky black and white letters had begun to take on some deeper angrier meaning over the previous 48 hours. With no better luck configuring XF86Config by hand, I decided to move on to the next distro, for the sake of publishing Monday’s issue with any distribution to start Distro II. Besides, I was starting to jones a bit - I’d been living without a Linux system for all of that 48 hours.

Interestingly, Caldera OpenLinux presented the same install interface as Lycoris. As I worked my way through the process, I realized that Lycoris is, in fact, based on Caldera. But it had nothing new to offer. Still no XWindow and no network. Reluctantly, I jumped back out to Windows to, once again, cull through the reams of free-form newsgroup documentation on my problems.

Almost immediately, I found an answer. As you’ll recall, I’m running a hacked together box with both an Intel I810 onboard video chip and a Voodoo 3 PCI. Everything I found indicated that Debian didn’t like the I810, without the agpgart module compiled into the kernel. There was also some indication that the mere presence of the I810 rendered the Voodoo useless, modules or not. This made sense in light of some of the error messages. I decided to pull the Voodoo, and give Deb one more try, building the agpgart code into the kernel during the install.

3:00 a.m. is too quickly becoming a routine. This morning at, yes, 3:00 a.m., I was still without an XWindow’ed Linux install. agpgart made not one whit of difference. I crawled off to bed feeling defeated as only a faithful Linux user can.

As of this issue, I do, in fact, have a new Linux install on the box. It’s not Deb. It’s not Caldera. I’ll get to those, come hell or high water. How did this all end? Well, as I said, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” In this case, the other is a new Linux distribution based, in part, on RedHat. Tomorrow, we’ll dig in.

Tony
Steidler-Dennison