Initial thoughts about Debian 2.1 (and I need some help!)
I finally installed Debian 2.1 after much effort. My Matrox
Millennium G200 video card was not recognized by the
version of XF86 that comes with Debian 2.1 but I was able
to upgrade to the XFree83 3.3.3.1-2 from the unstable packages.
Also, my mouse (Logitech MouseMan+ PS/2) was not working
at all, got that fixed by symlinking /dev/mouse to /dev/psaux.
Debian 2.1 rocks! I am very impressed with the window manager
menu system, I think that is so cool!! I am using WindowMaker 0.20.
Also, I was amazed at how easy it was to configure PPP using
the pppconfigure program. Very impressive!
However, I still have quite a few questions that I am hoping to
get answered :
(1) For console logins, how can I get the console screen to
be cleared after a user logs out ? RedHat 5.2 seems to do it by
default (ie without playing with any config files).
(2) If I download a bunch of .deb files myself to a dir on my HD,
how can I install them using a combination of dselect/apt ?
(3) I noticed that when I was running apt-get from a virtual
console (to upgrade to XF86-3.3.3.1), during the download the
other virtual consoles were 'locked' out. I couldn't switch over to
any of the other remaining 5 VCs. Is there a reason for this ?
Can this be fixed ? The moment that apt-get returned me to the
shell prompt I was able to switch to other VCs.
(4) Using the boot disk created during the install process, Debian
takes a very long time to reboot (about 4 minutes on my system).
However, when I created another boot disk (on another floppy)
using :
mkboot /boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36
Debian this time booted in around 10-15 seconds using this boot
disk created with mkboot. What gives ? What is the difference b/w
the two methods and which is recommended for making a boot
disk ?
(5) Initially, I tried to get the .debs for XFree86-3.3.3.1-2 from the
following site : ftp.netgod.net. Upon instructions from another Debian
user, who has been kind enough to offer email support during my
installation nightmare (Hi Kris!),
I added the following line to the end of /etc/apt/sources.list :
deb http://ftp.netgod.net/debian x/
Then, once I was connected via PPP, I typed the following on the
command line :
apt-get update
this worked fine.
Then I tried,
apt-get install xserver-svga
It attempted to download the .debs for the new 3.3.3.1-2 xserver,
but then a lot of messages were displayed saying that the .debs
weren't found (404: not found) and I wasn't able to get these
XFree86-3.3.3.1-2 .debs from the netgod site. Has anyone else had
this problem ? I was able to find these .debs when I connected
to the site using Netscape (in Windows) and tried to download
these .debs individually from the netgod ftp site. Can someone
explain why this happened, and how to download those .debs from
netgod's site (ftp.netgod.net) ?
I will be reinstalling Debian 2.1 soon and I don't want to switch to
glibc2.1 and some of the other unstable packages to get my video
card to be recognized properly.
(6) Because of (5) I removed the line
"deb http://ftp.netgod.net/debian x/"
and instead added the line
"deb http://ftp.netgod.net/debian unstable main contrib non-free"
to /etc/apt/soureces.list and then I tried to get the xsever-svga-3.3.3.1-2
and ended up upgrading to glibc-2.1 and a whole bunch of other
newer packages.
Is there anyway to backup these .debs which were downloaded to
my HD so that if I reinstall Debian 2.1, I don't have to download all
these .debs all over again (which BTW took over 2 1/2 hours over my
56k modem connection) ? I have a couple of old 540Mb HDs which I
use for backing up downloaded files prior to OS reinstallations.
(7) How can I get my SoundBlaster PCI128 sound card configured ?
Do I have to recompile the kernel for that ? Also, how do I setup/install
the ALSA drivers for this card (I had to use ALSA to get this sound card
to work with RedHat 5.2).
(8) During installation, I noticed a whole number of Linux Gazette
issues were being installed along with other docs. How do I read these
docs ? I thought they would have shown up on the menu system!
(9) I'd like to to upgrade to WindowMaker-0.60. What is the best/
recommended way of doing that ?
(10) It seems that I am booting up in 8bit color mode because the icons
in WindowMaker look quite bad. How do I change this so that I start
up in 16bit or 32bit mode ?
BTW, my system config is :
Celeron 300A (at 300MHz)
ABIT BH6 MotherBoard
128 MB RAM
Quantum 10.2Gb HD
Matrox Millennium G200 8Mb Video Card
SoundBlaster PCI 128 Sound Card
ACER 56k Internal ISA Modem (jumpered to COM2/IRQ3)
Creative 36X CD-ROM Drive
ADI MicroScan 6P 19" monitor
I would appreciate any help on the above mentioned items. Thanks for
reading the whole post (if you made it this far!). I apologize if any of these
questions are FAQs but after having spent the past few hours getting
Debian 2.1 up and running and am kinda anxious to get these few issues
out of the way.
Thanks.
--
Salman Ahmed
ssahmed AT interlog DOT com
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