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Re: noob with a few questions



Kent West wrote:

Abe Olson wrote:

I just installed debian testing on my ultra 80. The install was really easy and most everything seems to be working. I have a few questions though.

You'll probably find that you get better results by separating your questions into separate threads, and titling each thread with a more descriptive subject line.

Gotcha.  I'll do that form now on.  Thanks.

1. How do I add something to the default run level? I need afbinit to run before X starts so I can have a fast(er) X experience.

Just put your script in /etc/init.d, and then a symlink in /etc/rc2.d, making sure to title it similarly to the other scripts in /etc/rc2.d, with the "S" meaning this is a Startup-type script, and the numbers determining the order in which the scripts run.

Thanks. I read about it in the debian policy manual and got it straightened out.
2. I choose the right time zone during the install but my clock keeps being wrong after boot. I've set it a few times with date but it hasn't stuck so I want to figure out whats going on and fix it for real.

You probably need to set the hardware clock (are you dual-booting? this could matter). Try something like
   hwclock --systohc
to copy the system time into the hardware clock. (I'm not sure this will work on sparc architecture though; it does work on x86.)

You might also be interested in chrony or ntp-simple & ntpdate to have your system go out to a time server on the internet to get time/date corrections.

Once I added rtc to /etc/modules and rebooted I was fine. The clock is holding my local time just fine now.


3. After boot, gnome system monitor reports very little memory used. Over the course fo the day the used memory amount rises until I have almost no free memory. Gnome system monitro shows almost all of the used memory as being cached. Is this normal?

I'm no expert, but yes, I believe it's normal for the system to claim all free memory for caching purposes; it'll let go of the memory when the memory is needed.

Sweet. I'd noticed that in gentoo on my pc but I remembered the ram being freed up faster then it is on the ultra.
4. How do I change the gnome window manager to sawfish from metacity? I just can't figure out that one.



I'm not a gnome user, but I think there's a gnome control panel for that sort of thing.


5. I can get sound by plugging headphones or speakers into the cdrom drive and some applications send sound out the (admittadly not bad sounding) tower speaker. None of the outputs on the sound card itself seem to work though. How can I get that to work?

I'm not sure on sparc, but on x86 I'd be asking these questions:
What version of kernel do you have (uname -a)?
Which version of Debian did you install (stable, testing, unstable)?
What's the output of "lspci"?
What's the output of "lsmod"?


I'll start a new thread to address the issue of sound. Look for that thread for my reply ;-)

(I've never tried to get sound working on sparc, so I'm not sure what issues you might run into.)

Abe



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