Good news; The SMC card does indeed work.
News: After the first attempt to upgrade to RH7.0 the system would only boot
from the emergency floppy. However, a second pass through the installation
process got the system to boot from the hard drive, go figure.
Bad news: Prior to the upgrade the Window Manager worked. After the
upgrade it comes up, properly displays a startup screen in GNOME or KDE,
then proceeds to paint the whole screen black. It scatters windows randomly
all over the screen, and likes to loose its place -- like you would expect
if the monitor were being over-driven.
So I re-ran Xconfigurator, and it named the Video-Card and Monitor to the
letter from its database. The test is great, the herringbone pattern is
fine -- just like before.
Time to try 'startx' again. Same thing. It likes to paint the screen
black, paint app-windows more than once, and tile patterns diagonally over
the screen. In KDE refreshing the screen pretty much works, except that the
next action screws everything up all over again.
Why is this critical? Because my colleague Joe is going to want to use SWAT
to configure SAMBA. (He doesn't believe in idiotically difficult hand
configuration. He is now TOTALLY convinced that Windows 2000 is a real OS
and GNU/Linux is a learning tool that is designed to be buggy, impossible to
use, and obscenely difficult to learn.)
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Of course to run SWAT it looks like I'll need to configure Apache and start
httpd.
This is quickly turning into a comic debugging session of infinite regress.
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> I avoid the Linksys
> cards - when I
> can go to Fry's and get an SMC-EZ card which will be detected right out of
> the box for $15. Everything else seems pointless.
>
> Craig
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