debian basics

[Marcel Kunath]

Hello,

I have two debian quesions. I now have network install functioning well and
done it three times. It's not that difficult once you have it figured out. I
think there may be a bug on the woody install disks though.

I had an already partitioned drive (from past suse install). I tried to do a
network install but I was unable to configure any drivers after installing the
drivers into /target/. It would never give me the screen options. After I
repartitioned the drive it would allow me to do so. Not sure why it wouldn't
like suse's partitions.


ok my questions.

1. I had testing installed with xf86-4.1.0-6. It configured my card correctly
ati mach64 3d rage iic(ati driver). Gnome came up but I noticed when I moved my
mouse it hung quite frequently. I basically couldnt do anything. Luckily I had
saved my old suse xf config file and I put it in place. The screen settings
were set up a lot better but I still got the hanging problem. I wondered if
gnome was the problem since in suse's kde I had a smooth 4.1.0. So I installed
xdm and kdm and I still had these short interrupts which happened especially
when moving the mouse fast across the screen. I went and got another mouse and
the same problem. Basically X is unusable.

Well the ati card has been supported since years and I used it for years in
Linux. I tried switching to 3.3.6 but failed how to get 3.3.6 installed, 4.1.0
uninstalled without all the dependencies messed up and it removing about every
X related package out there.

So as I am just getting familiar with debian I just went ahead and did an
upgrade to unstable. That went quite smooth. unstable has 4.1.0-7 and I still
got the hanging problem. It gets short freezes which make working impossible.
The text terminal works flawlessly though.

Q1: Is it possible to downgrade from unstable back to testing? How? I put in
sources.list the http's for unstable and apt-get update. Then I apt-get upgrade
but it finds 0 packages to upgrade(downgrade). If not possible I would like to
downgrade XF86 to 3.3.6 in unstable.

Q2: How do I downgrade to 3.3.6 XF86 without having packages like kdebase
uninstalled when deselecting 4.1.0?

Thanks,

mk