MEPIS Community Forum

Well, I think it's nice to see you here! Is that what you meant?

Back to the topic: I wish we had a front end for newbies.

Just recommend to them to PRINT the instructions.. as in hard-copy. That helped me a lot, to do that (I printed the entire wiki smxi page), less scary.

This is a great suggestion!
"Leading someone to the deep end of the pool" doesn't mean throwing them in. Printed instructions (or another computer to read online text) is the right way to hold a person's hand who's going into uncharted waters.

Many people looked at the question, and nobody was able to find a safe, reasonable method to launch smxi or sgfxi from X.

We did find some unsafe, unintuitive methods that I rejected because they killed certain key features that are critical, especially the ability to ctrl+c to exit the script if something goes wrong.

The problem, to be brief, is that when you run a session in a virtual terminal in X, which is what the console or a frontend would be doing, that session terminates on logout.

the only way around that we found was using what I consider an unsafe and somewhat nasty hack, and that is a direction I don't want to go, when sgfxi requires really only a simple set of commands to run safely and without a nasty hack.

The nvidia / fglrx drivers cannot be unloaded or installed in X, since they are either running x or contain internal to the .run package error handlers that sgfxi can't do anything about, to avoid installation in x.

You can see for yourself, start sgfxi in X, override the x tests with -X and see where you get.

If nothing has changed, fglrx will hard lock your system and require a reboot, and nvidia will exit with error.

The exception to this is I believe distro drivers, they can I think be installed in X, not sure, I test them only very rarely.

But if radeon/nouveau are running X, again, you can't switch them off.

This question comes up routinely, I should have copied the forum thread about it in the old sidux forums before the guys forked themselves, again, and vaporized the old forums.

To be explicitly clear, you can say 'this is a great idea' all you want, but unless tested, safe, working, patches / code are offered to me, that pass quality and user stability/safety review, it's just words with no referents.

By the way, I suggest someone talk to ikey at Linux Mint Debian, he's already working on a basic gui for sgfxi that will tell the users some things, like what drivers are available etc, I don't know where he's at with that, but I've done some changes internally already to handle that type of interface. So don't reinvent a wheel that is already being invented now, whatever he comes up with will be the most that can be offered via a gui.

Thanks, h2-1.
Good explanation.

Maybe i'm a comp-tech simpleton, but I analogize trying to install/fix X drivers from within X like trying to patch a boat that's floating.
"Take 'er to drydock, lubber!"

SilverBear, an excellent analogy in fact. With the added complication that this boat will either have its engines stopped or issue an alarm when you try to patch it when it's floating.