Sad PenguinMonday, January 17, 2005
Sad Penguin moves up in the world
As mentioned in my main blog, the strapline for this blog is now out of date in that I've recently bought a new PC - an entry-level Dell desktop. It's a huge improvement on the old one - which with a bit of effort and expenditure could have been upgraded to "obsolete" status - though in some respects it hasn't exactly "run out of the box".
Having basically wiped the hard drive (including the "hidden" recovery partitions that Dell put in to save on the cost of supplying a couple of CD Roms, at the expense of 10% of your hard drive) to have a Windows/Linux dual boot, I then spent the last weekend in an eventually successful attempt to get the graphics working on Linux (was only getting 16-bit colour - mind you, Windoze was doing even worse, being unable even to recognise the monitor and the integrated graphics chipset, and couldn't manage more than a 640x480 default resolution).
(For those who might want to get an Intel Extreme Graphics chipset (82865G) working on a Dell Dimension 3000 desktop, the answer is you increase the Video RAM buffer setting in the BIOS to 8 MB rather than 1 MB. That should be enough to get the graphics working for non-demanding uses. Then set the Video RAM in XF86Config-4 to something like 32 MB - or using XAdminmenu, if you have the good taste to be a Libranet user - if you want to use it for games. OK, so this is a pretty dull paragraph for 99% of you to read, but if it saves just one person 12 hours+ of unnecessarily driver downloads, kernel recompilations and hairstyle reconfigurations - a.k.a. tearing your hair out - then it'll all be worthwhile).
Windows and Dell haven't exactly covered themselves with glory. I had been planning to install Linux only once I'd made sure everything was working, but ended up bringing it forwards because of problems like XP repeatedly losing my external modem. Then it turns out that Dell don't supply copies of any drivers for the monitor, graphics or audio - the only options if you need to reinstall these are (i) download new versions from Dell's website - just what you want when you only have a dial-up connection - or (ii) wipe the entire hard drive and restore the PC to its "out of the box" state using PC Restore. So I now have a computer that dual boots into an utterly useless - i.e. even more than usual - XP set-up. Ho hum.
Anyway, back to Linux where, while I still have no sound, the graphics are now working fine. So I spent a happy hour last night playing Tuxracer and Head Over Heels - an old ZX Spectrum game which has now been remade by Retrospec.
But I think this means that the Sad Penguin is now a Happily Racing Tux, and accordingly this blog is now officially closed.
Having basically wiped the hard drive (including the "hidden" recovery partitions that Dell put in to save on the cost of supplying a couple of CD Roms, at the expense of 10% of your hard drive) to have a Windows/Linux dual boot, I then spent the last weekend in an eventually successful attempt to get the graphics working on Linux (was only getting 16-bit colour - mind you, Windoze was doing even worse, being unable even to recognise the monitor and the integrated graphics chipset, and couldn't manage more than a 640x480 default resolution).
(For those who might want to get an Intel Extreme Graphics chipset (82865G) working on a Dell Dimension 3000 desktop, the answer is you increase the Video RAM buffer setting in the BIOS to 8 MB rather than 1 MB. That should be enough to get the graphics working for non-demanding uses. Then set the Video RAM in XF86Config-4 to something like 32 MB - or using XAdminmenu, if you have the good taste to be a Libranet user - if you want to use it for games. OK, so this is a pretty dull paragraph for 99% of you to read, but if it saves just one person 12 hours+ of unnecessarily driver downloads, kernel recompilations and hairstyle reconfigurations - a.k.a. tearing your hair out - then it'll all be worthwhile).
Windows and Dell haven't exactly covered themselves with glory. I had been planning to install Linux only once I'd made sure everything was working, but ended up bringing it forwards because of problems like XP repeatedly losing my external modem. Then it turns out that Dell don't supply copies of any drivers for the monitor, graphics or audio - the only options if you need to reinstall these are (i) download new versions from Dell's website - just what you want when you only have a dial-up connection - or (ii) wipe the entire hard drive and restore the PC to its "out of the box" state using PC Restore. So I now have a computer that dual boots into an utterly useless - i.e. even more than usual - XP set-up. Ho hum.
Anyway, back to Linux where, while I still have no sound, the graphics are now working fine. So I spent a happy hour last night playing Tuxracer and Head Over Heels - an old ZX Spectrum game which has now been remade by Retrospec.
But I think this means that the Sad Penguin is now a Happily Racing Tux, and accordingly this blog is now officially closed.
