Just installed Debian 3 Woody. Help

**tommo** · 08-01-2005

Haha wow! I just installed Debian Woody on Dual Boot with Windows XP. I don't really know what to say. The only other distro I have tried is Red Hat but that is ridiculously simple to install and stuff. Now I have done a really basic install. Basically nothing. I thought this was a GUI distro. Clearly not so far. Am I going to have to download KDE or Gnome or something? I don't have any multimedia software or anything. I know my way about the shell I guess, but I'm not an expert. I typed in 'startx' and this pathetic excuse for a GUI comes up. Haha. Am I gonna have to apt-get everything I need or what? Any help whatsoever will be much appreciated. Cheers

**alain_** · 08-01-2005

yep, you need to install the desktop environment you want.

like you said, you did a clean install, this means you have to take care of everything else,
make it as clean or bloated as you want

**tommo** · 08-01-2005

cool thanks for the reply. I installed KDE. The only problem is that my screen resolution is painfully low resulting in everything appearing huge and....crap basically. Is there anyway to sort that out?

**alain_** · 08-01-2005

dpkg-reconfigure your-xserver
don't know with one you use, look with dpkg -l | grep xserver

choose the right resolution AND correct frequenties for your monitor

**tommo** · 08-01-2005

Right OK, I ran the command resulting in the following output:

Code:

ii xserver-common 4.10-16woody5 files and utilities common to all x servers
ii xserver-xfree8 4.10-16woody5 the XFree86 server

I checked the dkgp man pages and could't figure out how to reconfigure as you said.

**nomar** · 08-01-2005

My first recomendation is to start again with the latest version of Debian, which is sarge. Use the netinstall CD if possible.

Though it sounds as if you did install sarge if your new to linux and found the woody install easy!

**alain_** · 08-01-2005

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 should do the trick.

there is absolutely no need to reinstall if you encounter a minor problem.
this is not windows you are toying with

**tommo** · 08-02-2005

Thanks a lot for your help.

I'm in a spot of bother here. I know very little about my monitor. All I know is that it is a 15 inch TFT LCD monitor.

There were a couple of questions it asked in the configuration which I didn't know the answer to, such as what is my video card's bus identifier, and when asked to select the desired x server driver, I just used the 'vga' one as that is what the install guide said to do if I didn't know which to chose. I'm not even sure about my video card either tbh.

I booted up into windows and it said that the display was operating at 1024x768 pixels on 32 bit. It also said my Graphics controller was 'plug and play monitor on Intel(R) 82845G/GL/GE/PE/GV'.

So basically I can't seem to get it to an acceptable resolution as of yet. Any help on the configuration would be much appreciated. Thanks

edit: Apparently my monitor is a L15CX so I searched for it and came up with this. It says something about VESA so I chose that driver instead of VGA and I chose 1024x768 at 16 bit . Then I did 'startx' and it was beginning to work, I was getting all excited, but then it crashed. Bummer

**nomar** · 08-02-2005

there is absolutely no need to reinstall if you encounter a minor problem.
this is not windows you are toying with

If you are refering to my post, then let me explain.

Woody is a few years old now, and hasn't got much life left in it (support that is). Therefore, it would be far wiser to install sarge, which is new, got better hardware support and generally easier for the novice.

**DoctorDan** · 08-02-2005

i had to put it down all the way to 8 bit before it worked fine. if the problem has to do with that then you can either use 8 bit or install drivers.

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