Re: Debian and Dell?
Hi Ed,
Ed Sutherland wrote:
> I just purchased a Dell for my home office and am interested in using
> Debian on a partition. As my only Linux experience comes from a Mac,
> I have some questions:
>
> 1) Will I be able to easily dual-boot Windows or Linux using yaboot,
> or will I need to go through some BIOS mumbo-jumbo?
The equivalent x86 tools are lilo or grub. One thing you need to be
aware of: the x86 BIOS is much dumber than OpenFirmware. So if you use
lilo, you must re-run the "/sbin/lilo" program every time the kernel
location changes, even just the inode (e.g. by installing or upgrading a
kernel image), otherwise you may find yourself unable to boot. The
Debian kernel packages do this automatically upon install / upgrade, but
you should be aware of it if you compile your own kernel.
I think grub gets around this limitation in some way, but I'm not
completely sure as I don't use it.
Your BIOS may have some silly "boot virus" protection which you'll have
to disable so it doesn't complain when lilo or grub overwrites the
master boot record; this should be an option if you press F8 while booting.
Don't know about your second question so I'll skip it.
> 3) Does the i86 side of Debian better support Web graphics and
> animation formats -- such as shockwave?
There is a package in contrib that installs the Macromedia Flash player
Web browser plugin. There is Acrobat Reader, for which Christian
Marillat provides unofficial packages, which can read some PDF files
that xpdf and gv choke on. For videos: there is MPlayer (packages also
provided by Marillat), although you're probably aware of it since it's
available on powerpc too. There is also RealPlayer (not in Debian, but
can be obtained at www.real.com ).
As far as I know Shockwave is not supported natively even on x86 Linux,
but there is CrossOver, a proprietary ($20?) version of Wine that allows
you to run a lot of Windows plugins and programs seamlessly; maybe it
supports a Shockwave plugin.
Hope this helps,
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG public key ID: 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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