{"id":286,"date":"2004-01-13T01:10:20","date_gmt":"2004-01-13T09:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thechunk.com\/blog\/archive\/xfree-me-from-having-to-be-a-video-card-geek\/"},"modified":"2004-01-13T01:10:20","modified_gmt":"2004-01-13T09:10:20","slug":"xfree-me-from-having-to-be-a-video-card-geek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/archive\/xfree-me-from-having-to-be-a-video-card-geek\/","title":{"rendered":"XFree me from having to be a video card geek"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, I downloaded and ISO image of the latest stable release of Debian Linux<\/a>, burned it to a CD, rebooted and started the install. Everything went fine until I hit the X Windows configuration. Being that I haven’t really messed around with Linux for about three years, I forgot how easy it is so screw up an X Windows install. I wrote down a bunch of hardware info about the machine from WinXP before I reformatted the hard drive, but neglected to check out the video card info. BIG mistake. I ended up guessing vga on the chipset and of course, it doesn’t work. Since I inheirited this machine from someone else, I don’t know what the hell is in there off the top of my head.<\/p>\n

Is it too much to ask for a Linux installer that can examine my video card and configure everything so that I don’t have to know the refresh rates of my monitor and the chipset of my video card? I think Red Hat<\/a> got this right at some point, but they’re now dropping their traditional packaging and splitting into Red Hat Enterprise and the Fedora Project<\/a>. Since I fear what is new, I’m a little skeptical of Fedora and I’m staying away for now. For instance, there isn’t any documentation for Fedora, per se. It appears that I’d have to use the Red Hat 9 manuals if I were going to try it out now. At the same time, I’m dreading trying to tweak an existing X Windows install. I may spend a little time trying to get it to work, but it’s not really something to which I want to devote more than an hour or so. Either way, I’m looking at yanking the video card and examining it. Not a big deal, but still. I can whine can’t I?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, I downloaded and ISO image of the latest stable release of Debian Linux, burned it to a CD, rebooted and started the install. Everything went fine until I hit the X Windows configuration. Being that I haven’t really messed around with Linux for about three years, I forgot how easy it is so screw […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3fonJ-4C","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}