Re: Looking for more Debian packages
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 01:31:24PM +0000, Jianan Huang wrote:
> 1) I read about disk boot problem in the mail list. Right now I boot
> from a floppy. My machine BIOS can only boot from the C drive or the
> floppy. I use D drive for my Linux.
"C drive" and "D drive" are DOS/Windows concepts, by the way, although
they're often mentioned in BIOSes as well. It would be less confusing if
you could get used to Linux-style terms like hda, hda1, etc.
Even if your BIOS can only boot from the first hard disk (/dev/hda) or
the first partition on the first IDE hard disk (usually "C drive" in
DOS-speak, /dev/hda1 here), LILO is quite clever and may be able to work
around this.
> If my floppy fails to boot, I may have to re-build a whole new system.
> It would be wise to have an image copy of the whole floppy as a
> backup. Is there a utility to create a binary image of a Linux floppy?
> I have looked at fdutils. It doesn't help.
Use 'dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/path/to/image bs=1024 count=1440' to create the
image and 'dd if=/path/to/image of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 count=1440' to write
it back. (I think the count of 1440 is right for a 1.44Mb floppy, but
adjust to taste.)
> 2) I have read about Linux BIOS. I believe BIOS is another area of
> software that has to open up. Does Debian have one, and come with
> source code too?
The BIOS is a piece of software embedded in your hardware that starts
before the operating system. So no, Debian doesn't include a BIOS as far
as I know. There are projects like http://freebios.sourceforge.net/ that
are trying to create a free BIOS.
> 3) Does Debian support freehand writing devices such as Wacom
> electronics pad? I'm talking about the device driver as well as
> application packages such as freehand editing for documentation and
> emailing, freehand drawing etc.
Not sure here, sorry. "Wacom" is mentioned in the Linux kernel's
configuration ("Wacom Intuos/Graphire tablet support",
CONFIG_USB_WACOM), so you could try that for the driver if you have a
USB tablet, but I have no idea about userspace software for this.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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