General Hardware
Contents |
Older Monitors
Newer monitors attached to newer video hardware, are automatically detected. Older ones often require manual configuration. Details will be posted here shortly. For now, here are two links to monitor specification info:
http://www.dewback.cl/files/public/confs/syncs.html
http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~zjohnson/doc/monitor.html
and the raw knowledge: use Control-Alt-F1 to login in text mode as root, edit "/etc/xorg.conf", and put the appropriate vertical and horizontal sync frequency ranges in.
A Printer Procedure
A great many printer drivers come with Ark. Just go to K menu, System, Printers, then Add a new printer, and check out the list. For others, you will have to download a driver.
One of these, is a Brother DCP-130 multifunction device.
First we go to http://www.linuxprinting.org , and search their database, and find:
http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Brother-DCP-130C
and drill down a number of links, and arrive here on the Brother web site:
http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/
and realize something you need to know: for modern Linux, we always want CUPS drivers. There are other kinds of drivers, but CUPS makes it much simpler than all other ways, it is the current standard Linux printer system. Knowing this, we see "To learn which models are supported and to download the appropriate CUPS Printer Driver or CUPS wrapper driver", and we click on the end of that sentence, to this page:
http://solutions.brother.com/linux/sol/printer/linux/cups_drivers.html Now we need RPM drivers for Ark, and so it helps to know that RedHat, Mandrake, and SUSE are all RPM-based systems. So we click on that link, and we get:
http://solutions.brother.com/linux/sol/printer/linux/cups_drivers.html#red
And we scroll down, and find an item for DCP-130C, which is yours. We click on Download, then click on I Accept, and an RPM file is saved to our Desktop!
Then, we open a Konsole, cd to the Desktop, get to superuser, and do:
rpm -iv dcp130ccupswrapper-1.0.0-9.i386.rpm
and we learn something interesting:
error: Failed dependencies:
dcp130clpr is needed by dcp130ccupswrapper-1.0.0-9.i386
So we know that another package from Brother, for this printer, is also needed. So we go back and download the LPR driver (dcp130clpr-1.0.0-9.i386.rpm); in this case, apparently, the CUPS driver is a "wrapper" for the LPR. We then install them both:
rpm -iv dcp*.rpm
and they go in AOK. Then we go to the K menu, System, Printers, start the process to Add a new printer. And lo and behold, the printer driver database is updated before our very eyes, and when we look, we find Brother DCP-130C right where it belongs :)
Old Sound Cards
In the Linux kernel, a huge collection of older sound cards are lumped into the 'sb' (Sound Blaster) collection, including all which use the several different ESS AudioDrive chipsets. This writer has found that the dockyard-devel kernel works considerably better with these sound cards, and so here is a procedure to handle them:
apt-get -t dockyard-devel install kernel#2.6.20-0.rc6.1ark \ kernel-drivers-sound-isa kernel-sound-oss
The above double command line, run as superuser, will download and install the neededs. Once installed, reboot, and go to the KDE Control Center, Sound & Multimedia, Sound System, and turn on the sound system. If it turns on OK, you're in. If it gives you an error, turn it off, and you'll have to edit the file
/etc/rc.local
and add the line
/sbin/modprobe --force sb
which should cause everything to work properly after you reboot again and turn on the sound system. Instead of rebooting, you can simply run '/sbin/modprobe sb' as superuser.
Recovering From a Failed Graphics Driver Installation
If you need to reset your graphics card and Ark configuration or simply need to login or access the command line:
- To get to the command line, on GRUB screen, press 'e'
- Choose the line starting with "kernel", press 'e' again, and append a space and the number 3 at the end
- At the command line, log in as arklinux, then run "su -", then "init-rescue x"
