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At the installer menu I'm seeing just a solid color (the font is the same color as the background), how do I fix this?

This is due to some problems with the linux framebuffer code. At the startup text (before the menu) type install vga=791 and it should boot up with less aggressive framebuffer options and show the menu properly. If you still have trouble come by #sourcemage on irc.freenode.net -- many people are online at all times of the day. You can also search the forums (or post a new topic) on [WWW] forums.sourcemage.org.

{i} This problem is known to happen only on the 0.9.3 ISO.

After booting from the initrd menu the screen goes blank. What should I do?

This may be due to the fact that your machine can't do the framebuffer. At the initrd menu type lowres and it should work. If even that does not work, type lowres vga=ask at the prompt and choose a vga mode at the next prompt.

How big should partitions be? Should I make a separate partition to hold the source code?

All you need to worry about here is making sure you have a small boot partition, a swap partition, and then your root partition. Generally, I set boot to 32 MB, swap to 2 GB, and root to the rest of the drive. Now, I'm setting up on large drives usually, so I have the freedom of setting up a 2 GB swap sapce and having lots of space left over for root.

{i} If you don't have oodles of hard drive space, just make sure that the sum of your RAM + SWAP is at least 1 GB.

As for making a separate partition for source, this isn't necessary, but feel free to set up your partition structure in whatever manner you desire. Something you could do if you have more than one physical drive is store sources on the alternate drive, i.e. you may want to mount /var/cache/sorcery on another drive.

There are some advantages to having seperate partitions, mostly for backup, e.g. a seperate home partition.

I found that there are no spells currently in the audio directory. What happened to KDEMultimedia?

The audio directory is no longer used. Most audio related spells are now stored in the multimedia section. KDEMultimedia is now stored under the KDE section.

I am trying to setup KDEVELOP and it requires KDEUTILS source in order to create the documentation. Which spell do I CAST to get the source?

If you have previously cast KDEUTILS, you should have the source available in the /var/cache/sorcery directory. Just bunzip2/tar the file to an appropriate location, and point KDEVELOP to it.

Note that if you have disabled caching or archiving, you may not have the file in /var/cache/sorcery. In this case, you can always look at /var/lib/sorcery/grimoire/kde/kdeutils/DETAILS and download the source from specified SOURCE_URL.

When installing, at what point do you start compiling?

Compiling automatically begins early on in the install. The first thing to be compiled is usually dhcpcd during the network setup. Of course, this only applies if you are using DHCP. However, most compiling doesn't actually happen until you start casting spells. This is after you have set up your partitions, copied the Source Mage CD, and rebooted.

I installed alsa-drivers/lib/utils awhile back, got 0.9.0beta10. This installed with linux-2.4.17, no problem. I later went for a sorcery update and got alsa 0.9.0beta12, and it appears this version requires linux-2.5.5, a development version.

This version of alsa will work fine with linux-2.4.17 At some point during the alsa-driver install it may ask you which kernel you would like to install along with the driver. You can safely say no to all choices and alsa will install for your current kernel.

I can't get device Y to work in X-windows, can you help?

Here's a user submitted answer, based on getting a PS/2 Wheel Mouse and Wacom USB Graphire2 tablet working under X at the same time:

/!\ All appropriate kernel modules must be running and functioning before this will work

An alternate way of generating a basic XF86Config is to run /usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 -configure. This will attempt to generate an XF86Config by autodetecting the hardware. It will store the generated file in their home directory with their login name as the extension. (i.e., logged in as root the file will be /root/XF86Config.root) I think the mouse has to be linked to /dev/mouse for it to properly detect the type of mouse.

{OK} Thanks to Robin Cook for this helpful information.

{i} The same goes for Xorg --configure for those who prefer to use Xorg.

When installing Source Mage Linux under VMWare, I get the following message: /devices/discs: No such file or directory Error: Expected at least 6 tokens for --menu, have 4. Use --help to list

This message occurs when VMWare is set up to emulate a SCSI hard disk. Recreate the virtual hard disk as an IDE disk and the problem will go away.

Why might I need (want) the code in CVS? I can download all spells with

The CVS always has the latest versions of spells and sorcery code. If you really wanted the latest, and didn't want to wait for it to be released as an official update, you could download the CVS version. But the spells in the CVS version are not necessarily fully tested. So there may be some bugs, which is why it hasn't been fully released for a sorcery update.

Nevertheless, if you want to live on the bleeding edge, you should get the CVS code several times a day as it is constantly changing.

I am planning to switch my laptop from Red Hat Linux to Source Mage and I was told that it would be easier if I got the kernel parameters from my current installation. How do I do this?

A good bet would be to go to /usr/src/linux (which is usually a sym-link to your current linux kernel source tree) and copy the .config file out of it. Then, put that .config file in the root of your new kernel source tree in Source Mage (again /usr/src/linux), and recompile your kernel.

Note that while this will give you a kernel that functions the same as the one from your Red Hat distribution, Red Hat by default compiles a LOT of extra options into their kernel for compatability options. This is what we're trying to avoid with SMGL, so perhaps an added step you should take is, once you've copied the .config file to your current kernel source tree, run a make menuconfig and remove any options that you don't think are necessary for your machine. This could be hit and miss, so keep your old kernel around to boot off of, just in case!

Want more info on compiling your kernel? Be sure to read the [WWW] Kernel HOWTO!

last edited 2006-09-21 01:36:56 by MatthewClark