Getting the GUI up part 1: finding the video card model and make on the dv2945se

Assuming that one likes to use a GUI on a computer (Firefox, anyone?), the most natural thing someone thinks upon starting a fresh installation on Slack is "Where's my GUI?" Or, for Windows users, "Where's my start button?"

Okay, they changed the "start" button to a nameless bubble for Windows Vista and 7, which is a shame, because I used to take great delight in hacking Windows to change the 'tar' in "start" to 'hi.' It's nice and subtle, thus people don't notice the change right away, so it served as a great amusement when I did it to the family's Windows '98 box.

Pranks aside, let's get on with Slack!

Hey, anyone got any good pranks for Windows or Linux desktops that are subtle, amusing, and nondestructive? (This means changing the screensaver or wallpaper to the BSOD doesn't count because it can lead to data loss on reboot!) Leave your pranks the comments, please!

Okay, okay, I'll get back on topic! Slack is more fun than pranks are, anyway... Well, maybe not, but the fun lasts longer and there's less likelihood of retribution...

The way you start the GUI on a fresh install of Slack is to type,

startx

Simply put, the response I got from this laptop was not normal. On other boxes, Slack happily opens up the desktop and you're good to go.  But, no.  This is one of the quirks of this laptop -- getting its video card set up is a pain.  Time to crash the GUI and install the video driver.

To get out of the GUI, hold down ctrl-alt-f1 all at the same time. This will return you to the command line, where you won't have a friendly blinky cursor. To get the blinky cursor back, press

ctrl-c

which is Linux for "Pretty please, cancel that program."

Time check...

Elapsed time interacting: 1 minute
Total time interacting: 2 minutes
Total time waiting: 0 minutes

Okay, how about asking Linux to configure the graphics? Type:

su -c xorgsetup

The su -c command causes the computer to ask you for the root password. This is necessary because ifconfig is a command that cannot be run as a regular user. Feed it its password, and the command you requested will run.  After running xorgsetup, I typed:

startx

And... still broken.

So, I need to install a graphics driver on a computer that has no graphics driver, thus no access to Firefox...

It's worth noting that it's not common for Slackware to have this much difficulty loading graphics. But you get what you get with certain fussy laptops.

To detect the hardware on the computer, I typed:

su -c lspci

Somewhere in that mess, I have the listing:

00:12.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C67 [GeForce 7150M / nForce 630M] (rev a2)

This is a beautiful thing because nVidia provides a graphics driver for Linux.

I could be boring and look up the driver on another computer and sneakernet the file over. More on that in a minute. Here's how I dealt with this as if I didn't have another computer on hand to run to:

lynx

...which tries to start up a non-graphical web browser. I say try, because what I ended up with was a red bar with yellow text that said, "Alert!: Unable to connect to remote host." Well, as I said, the wireless card doesn't work properly on this computer, and besides, it doesn't know the password and such on my wireless router. So I'll just plug it in via ethernet cord.

Plug it in, see the nice green light in the cord's port go blinky blinky.  Let's try this again.

lynx

...same error message.

Time check...
Elapsed time interacting: 1 minute
Total time interacting: 3 minutes
Total time waiting: 0 minutes

Now, this issue has nothing to do with the wireless driver since I'm not using the wireless card at all. What's the problem, then? I'm on a network that uses DHCP, but I haven't told the computer to get itself a new IP address.