I could never get X to work well on my Thinkpad T22 with RedHat 7.2. So I've decided to give Debian a try, the latest and greatest, 3.0r0. Jigdo'ed the CD images. Decided to install it on a very old test box first since I have never installed Debian before. Good news is that the installation is reasonably straightforward. Bad news is that I cannot get X to work with my old system, which has a working X running on RedHat 7.2. 20 xfree86 -configure later, I have decided to.... install RedHat 7.3 on the same machine to see what RedHat decided to be a good XF86config-4.... One thing is that Debian 3.0 came with XFree 4.1.x, which is old. I was hoping for 4.2. Also, XFree somehow removed support for "S3" chipset directly? At least that's what I found. This test box is very old and has a Diamond Stealth 64 with S3 765 chipset and 2 Meg of mem. Antique!

Now I got RedHat 7.3 installed on this old machine, and I have a different problem !! It does not find my old NE2000 clone ethernet card. I have to dig around until I read the ethernet how-to on using two ethernet card. It talked about problem with old ne2000 clones. I had to add to the /etc/modules.conf file entry to tell the kernel what's the parameters for the card:


alias eth0 ne
options ne io=0x300