I have during the last 10 days or so tried many many times with many many distros to install SuSe 11.1 to a very old Toshiba S3000-x4 Laptop. this belongs to an aquaintence of mine.
Before any attempt made I upgraded 128M memory by adding 512M module and the Bios to ver1.6 from Toshiba site.
Suse 11.1 Gnome and KDE4+ both Unsuccessful Ubuntoo (Who) Unsuccessful,Mint6 likewise.Oh Dash I said I’ll try a Live Knoppix 5.3.1 Wonderful it worked. Now I said “If that works I will make SUSE 11.1 work - somehow.” Well I tried and I tried and I tried. The Key is in the xorg.conf file. That at least is where I got my inspiration from when looking at Knoppix xorg.conf - WOW very inclusive of every thing. I eventually succeeded with SuSe11.1 KDE3.5+.
I had searched the Forums NO answers found. As in many forums the problem one requests help about is most often ignored on the basis of "if this person does not know how to do it then as I’m a Linux Guru I’ll ignore this plea for help and refer it to some useless ‘sticky’ " Thanks very much but some of us newbies (I am not one) do not understand the convoluted and obfuscated language of “experts”. My plea is if you know the answer then be less succinct in your answer and give us the help we ask and Linux will move on at a much greater rate. Everyone will want a distro on their machine not just the selfish “I’ll keep the newbies guessing and hopefully they will all go back to the Redmond issuances and leave us to covet our Suse, Fedora10 (that didn’t install either) Ubuntus K X E varieties and Slackware Distros”
This is not about me I am a persistant type but about many responses I see on all forums when the Experienced Linuxer constantly give of their time and also the 2 fingered salute.
I might add I first attempted Linux Suse and Slackware around 1994/5 time with some 44+ floppies. I still have not mastered it. Give me Coherent Unix any time It had fantastic Users manual with as much information as any newbie could wish for.
The Tosh is up and running with Wireless from a D-Link 111 stick. Ralink rt73 module no problems. either. I’m ****-a-Hoop I mastered this task all by myself. I’m 71 and suffer inumerable heart and associated problems but I try to help anyone who asks for help. I first entered the Computer Industry in 1966 EnglishElectric Leo-Marconi KDF7 an KDF9.
No, this is very unfair of you. The reason you got no answer could be because nobody knows the answer. I certainly don’t because I have done very little on X setups, so I won’t waste your time and mine guessing.
We are not out to get an ego trip from your ignorance. Sometimes we are just as ignorant.
Congratulations on your eventual successful install, and thankyou for sharing your eventual solution.
Reminds me of back in 1998, when I installed Red Hat on an old laptop for the 1st time. I ended up getting the xfree86 config file (we used that instead of xorg in those days) off of another distribution, modifying it, and using it to get Red Hat up and running on X Window.
You expressed a complaint about the (lack of) support you obtained. We are all volunteers here, we do NOT get paid for our efforts, and we do our best out of our spare time, given that many of us have full time jobs in non-related Linux areas, and we have many other home and family commitments.
Since this is your first post on this forum under the handle hawkshead, are you using multiple handles on our forum, because clearly there is NOT one request for help from you on this forum.
Still, welcome to our forum, and any positive technical contributions you can provide to help make it better.
Yes I only have one handle and No I made no request for help. I also sincerely apologise for giving the impression I was complaining about this forum. I was careful to use the plural ‘forums’. I looked at any and many I could find. I have been a SuSe fan for many years and still think it is by far the best Distro in the Linux World and fully appreciate the time and effort put in by yourself and all who give so freely of their time to this Forum. I did, so far as I recollect make some contribution with regard to getting X-Fi sound card working but perhaps it ended up in the ether. Thankyou for you indulgence.
PS. The Phrase "****-A-Hoop is an expression meaning ‘Over the Moon’ and has always and only used as an expression of great delight at achieving something. The Nursery Rhyme - Ride A **** Horse to Banbury Cross- springs to mind.
I still think that even though you are not referring to this forum, that you are being unfair to Linux forums in general. I have seen no reason to believe that Linux forums in general have people who are unwilling to help. Perhaps the technical level might not be as high in some forums, but in general Linux forum people are not out to get a kick of other people’s ignorance.
Sometimes you need to be more specific in the description of the problem. If the post is entitled something like: “help my X server freezes”, and there is little specific to go on in the body of the post, then a lot of people will pass it up, not sure if they have anything useful to say. A more knowledgeable person might give you a post to a general page for starters. If you feel the answer is not specific enough, then you have to chime in with specific questions, like “I have an XYZ card, and I’m getting no better than 640x480 on it, where would I need to fix that?” Or provide those details in the beginning.
Finally, there are always a proportion of questions with no answer simply because nobody knows. It can happen that perhaps you are the first person to attempt to install Linux on some obscure laptop. People are not ignoring you if you get no replies, maybe it’s uncharted territory.
And then it could depend on when you post. If you happen to post when few people are around, maybe your post slips off the most recent 100 before somebody who knows about your problem sees it. You might have to wait a while and then bump the post. Forums are run by volunteers after all, and they have other demands on their time.