Sweeties, Pies and Ginger

After fixing Grub to enable me to use both Linux and Windows on the same box I decided that it was time to sort out the X Windows system and get a decent resolution. I'd installed Mozilla Firefox so that I could view the Debian website and stuff from inside Gnome, but I couldn't change the configuration as the OK button was off the bottom of the screen, I had to do something.

I tried to start of with dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86, but this just lead to me absolutely knackering Xfree86 to the point where it wouldn't start. So after a quick change of operating systems I did a bit of reading and remembered seeing lots of posts on the Debian user list from people running nVidia cards and motherboards.

Since I run both a nVidia graphics card (ancient) and a nForce 2 motherboard (not so ancient), I thought I'd better investigate. I found a load of nVidia packages via apt-cache search nvidia and I installed a couple of them. I also downloaded a couple of Linux installers from the nVidia website.

Armed with all of these packages I changed a few settings in the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file, but to no avai as I kept on getting a Fatal Error No screens found error message. Doing a search for this in Google, was like pulling teeth, it seemed like every problem you might have would result in this error, so I had no idea where to begin.

After reading the help on the nVidia website I decided to make a few further changes to the XF86Config-4 file, but that didn't seem to make any difference. I was was beginning to get a bit annoyed at this point as Knoppix can automatically detect all my hardware and set X up and running correctly, so why can't Debian do it as well?

Then I had a brain wave, if Knoppix can do it and it's based on Debian, shirley I can just take the config file it produces and use that? So that's what I did, after a couple of minutes of trying to find a disk that would let me copy the config to it, I finally rebooted back into Debian and switched the config files.

Upon the next reboot, X started up and into 1280x1024 resolution, perfect. After that I installed Mozilla Thunderbird and switched window managers from Gnome (yuk) to KDE. I now have a Linux desktop machine that I can surf the web, send and receive email and read newsgroups from; in essence, almost everything I was doing on my windows box. All that is left now, is to put a Java development environment on it and start finishing a couple of the projects I've got going.