Reconfigure/Recompile the newer OS's kernel because apparently they've changed to a newer, less-tested/experimental, scheme for detecting hardware, which causes segfaults while trying to locate the boot hard-disk, whenever a PCI graphics card is inserted. (WTF?)

Download the latest version of the Glint video driver... (TODO: Link it)

Just Delete any references to miInitializeBackingStore() (and the header-file that defines it)... Apparently that's what everyone else does. (Seriously, Google it! Nada info on *what* this is, just a bunch of people DELETING it from their source-code. WOOT!)

Fight with settings for days on end to find out that it's not that X is crashing, but that GDM3 (gnome-desktop) doesn't work with xinerama, because xinerama doesn't work with 3D rendering, and GDM3 won't work AT ALL without it. So instead you get two black screens. Or, if you're lucky, you'll get one screen that seems to work great and another that's completely unusable except to show black and give you some space to move a mouse around on. Oh, and the newer version of Xorg no longer supports Xaa, which has been around for something like 20 years, but that's another story.

Decide "Fine, I liked GDM2 better anyhow! Much more customizable, lower resource-requirements, much faster... Context-sensitive menus (which, by the way, *revolutionized* computing, why the hell would they phase it out?!). I'll just switch back..." Only to find out it's no longer in your new distro...

It's like in this one version-increment (of 8 now) they decided to ditch *everything* that's been 'round and well-supported for ages. And all because my Friggin' Firefox was about to be phased-out of support by Youtube. And mistakenly thought I'd get *improved* functionality/compatibility in nearly all ways by upgrading a *linux* system... And if you think I'm crazy, then I DARE YOU to look into the kernel configuration ('make menuconfig')... yahknow that ISDN support is still *default*? Yep, we're talking 128kbps (that's kilo BITs per second, only twice as fast as a phone-modem, you remember those?). And they're still making improvements to drivers for RLL/MFM hard drives (which, as far as I'm aware, never came with systems newer than a 286, and are generally no larger than around 30MB (that's THIRTY MEGA BYTES)).

Why. The. Heck.

Give up on Gnome altogether, and choose a different window/desktop manager. Done And Done.

Time Spent: well over a work-week. Sheesh.

(Worked in the older version of the OS on the first day!).

Oh, right... And before all that: spend a day repairing a monitor that's been dead for ... sheesh, was this given to me for repair nearly a decade ago?

Turns out a bunch of surface-mount resistors on the backlight-inverter board were poorly-soldered. Apparently a common problem with this unit.

Oh, right... and immediately after that, spend a day trying out different vid-cards from the ol' stockpile to see which are multi-monitor-compatible... find one that's 8 WHOPPING MegaBytes that *might* work... Make a go at it... Then realize that completely stupidly you'd forgotten the very video card that *came with* the monitor you've been using for the last year... The irony of the fact that this video-card was specially-designed for that monitor, and that special-design had been hacked apart to make that monitor compatible with standard video-cards (like that built-in to the system). So, realizing, that you're going to re-add that *custom* video-card to your system in order to drive a *different* *standard* monitor, and continue running the display it was *customized for* through a hacked-together adapter to connect it to a *standard* videocard. HEH!

Boy-howdy, making that adapter was no small feat! I'd be a fool to take it apart... even though I could make use of it in another project... (what was that, again? Oh yeah, a "cintique"-like monitor/wacom from my old laptop that died, necessitating that adapter in the first-place, so I could get these old PCs running). WEE HACKING! https://sites.google.com/site/geekattempts/home-1/sgi-1600sw