Installation report on Athlon MP
Hi
I just installed debian woody on my little workstation:
Tyan Thunder K7 S2462
2x Athlon MP 1200
Onboard Dual Channel AHA7899
Onboard Dual 3com 980TX
IBM DDYS 18 GB
Quantum Atlas IV 9 GB
Yahama CRW4260
Pioneer CDU16s
FritzCard PCI V2
Ati Radeon SDR 32 MB (QD)
Soundblaster 128 (Ensoniq 1371)
Adaptec Firewire Controller
Adaptec 2910 SCSI Controller for external ZIP drive
Epson Perfection 1650 Scanner
Logitech Optical Mouse M/BD98 connected to ps/2 port
Cherry Keyboard connected to ps/2 port
Here are my findings:
I choose the 3.0.22-BF2.4 disks as the old IDE disks do no longer
support my SCSI adaptor and I did a network install via my DSL router.
Everything went just perfect, I could choose all my hardware and so on,
except the slowliness of the framebuffer was a bit suprising. I put the
installation on the Quantum (/dev/sdb), went with ReiserFS and put Lilo
on /dev/sda. I was really impressed, that my Windows 2000 partition
appeared in the boot menu: Good work!
After the first boot the well known looping problem showed up. I did
what Joey said, installed the newer base-config package, and it worked
well. I choose dselect and made some selections on what I wanted to
install.
The first annoyance (kernel-image):
##########################
No Athlon SMP kernel-image. So I went with a i686 SMP kernel-image which
works fine, but probably I loose some performance.
The first problem (locale):
#########################
- the locales package is buggy:
Choosing de_CH as locale I get this message:
/usr/share/i18n/locales/de_CH:116 missing "
/usr/share/i18n/locales/de_CH:116 unknown character in field 'd_t_fmt'
/var/lib/dpkg/info/locales.postinst: [: missing ']'
The first two lines I could get rid of by adding an " to the end of the
line 116. The postinst problem remained. So I commented out the lines
and made manually a /etc/environment file and added a line LANG=de_CH.
By the way: an de_CH package with euro support would be very useful in
Switzerland, as we are in the middle of the euroland...
The second problem (network):
##############################
After I got rid of the locale problem I discovered that I had no network
connection: Well I had, but instead of the LAN my box choose the ISDN
adaptor to connect to the internet. As this was not configured yet,
there was not network connection at all. So I had to do a
/etc/init.d/isdntools stop and some fiddling with /etc/isdn/ipppd.ippp0
and setting "nodefaultroute" in it. Then I did a /etc/init.d/network
restart and there were the right routes again. But after the next reboot
the same thing... I always have to do a /etc/init.d/networking restart
to get rid of it.
The third problem (gpm - xfree):
###########################
After choosing the xserver and all that I started X. The mouse was
unusable, as there was GPM interfering. So I tried to go to the console
to stop gpm. But switching back to X the system froze. The freeze is no
debian specific problem, but an older problem between the irongate
chipset, the RADEON card and xfree86.
On the other hand: Big compliment as OpenGL acceleration worked out of
the box. Just the default fonts are ...., well you know. I took them
100dpi fonts and ttf-xft but the quality of the default fonts is really
shocking, too small and not readable... Okay I know it's just a detail,
but isn't it for their nice interfaces that people love macs?
The second annoyance (sound):
##############################
No sound for normal users. I tested it doing a play xy.wav. But the
default user does not have the necessary rights on /dev/dsp. Hm,
annoying. After chmoding the thing it worked of course.
After all I am very happy with the system and the installation. The only
problem is: I know quite a bit of linux now and it is perhaps the 15th
woody box I set up. But I do not think that any user with no special IT
skills could take these problems. Yes I know, my system is a bit
special, but a regular user and non IT pro would probably give up and
think, that linux isn't it yet.
Unsolved yet is still the routing problem between the network card and
ippp. For any reason ippp deletes the default route.
I hope this report is usefull in any way...
Marcel
-------------------
PGP / GPG Key: http://www.ncpro.com/GPG/mmweber-at-ncpro-com.asc
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-testing-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: