Re: Hesitating to take the plunge in Debian
On 12/1/2000 Renaud Dreyer wrote:
Ah... Well, I do have BootX and the Linuxppc R5 install on my Mac
OS partition so it shouldn't be a problem.
I personally think its a good idea to get direct booting going, bootx
seems to be having more problems with newer kernels, and is working
less and less with newer machines (g4 class) its not too reliable on
my blueg3, for newworld macs use yaboot, for oldworld I think quik
works, BenH is working on something call Miboot for some other macs
too (i think pre OF)
but aside from the stability issues I think its not very impressive
when an OS needs to crutch on another OS just to boot! so eventually
get OF booting going ;-)
There are a lot of things that worked better on my ancient MkLinux
system for example. I never had any problems with the keyboard
with MkLinux for example, but under Linuxppc, seemingly random
problems pop up with certain applications.
some keyboard stuff is still being worked out in the kernel as i
understand it. but debian on the intel side anyway is the far and
away best about keyboard issues, first unix i ever use where i never
get ^H^H^H when i press backspace, regardless of what im using be it
console or X. very nice.
> pretty much, except debian handles the server differently, instead
> you edit /etc/X11/Xserver to choose the real server. no symlinks.
> and i think Xpmac requires a kernel option or hack...
Yeah, there's a "xpmac legacy" option when configuring the kernel under
Linuxppc, I assume it is the same under Debian.
I really hope the accelerated Xpmac works under Debian because going back
to the unaccelerated Rage Orion will not be fun... And the
accelerated Xfree86 is not as stable or fast as the Xpmac.
I don't see why i should not work, but I will leave someone else to
comment, im not much up on X issues right now as the blueG3 is pretty
much lost cause for reasonable X use till a server comes out for that
card.
What a relief... How easy is it roll one's own Debian package
from a tarball?
this I am not certain of, I have never build a .deb before, look at
the package maintainer's howto on the debian site (somewhere sorry
don't have a link)
Extremely elegant! Since I want to Nextify my box as much as possible, this
is very important for me.
so do I, I wish there were more apps for GNUstep, and I am not sure
of some of the few GNOME apps which are interesting can be made to
look NeXTish without using the GNOME/E! bloat center (I prefer
windowmaker for a windowmanager) unfortunately i doubt any theme
will fix the menubars in the window, vertical menus are so much
nicer....
Ah, something else I wanted to ask... I assume it's easy to chase down
a specific library after a compile aborts and asks for it?
dpkg -S whateverfileorpath
and if that does not work debian has two search engines for the
entire archive one for packages/descriptions, the other for
individual files. I think there is a userspace utility that does
this so you don't have to use bloatscape too, i have not gotten
around to looking at that yet.
I wish I'd knew all of this a month ago, when I installed Linuxppc and
started to slowly try to fix and optimize everything... Ciao and thanks
again,
its amazing how linuxppc has a seemingly good reputation, but yet I
cannot understand the bugs in that distro, I don't wish to really put
them down for there work but they really need to do more testing and
wait longer before releasing, even redhat who has a tendency to leave
bugs in for release does not leave such a high number of frankly
stupid problems...
anyway I am very pleased to have a non redhat alternative for the PPC
arch, now i just wish i could compile a pure kernel from kernel.org
and have it work!!
Ethan
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