Re: Newbie problems galore
Hello
David A. Cobb (<Superbiskit@cox.net>) wrote:
> I purchased a CD set of "Debian 3.0 "Woody" Official" and started
> to install it.
> First woe: my hardware is by nVidia; the Official kernel on the CD
> is 2.4.18, nVidia provides a driver for 2.4.20/21 and the Debian
> archive has nVidia patches for 2.4.26. My plan is to go to .26, but
> in the meanwhile I can't use X Windows and I can't access my NIC, so
> all that stuff requires rebooting into Windows.
First of all, you don't need to upgrade the kernel to use XFree. Your
card should work with the vesa driver (no acceleration), and you can
download the graphics driver installer from nvidia.com, which can be
used with 2.4.18. If your card is not too new (GF2 or older) you can
also use the nv driver that comes with XFree.
I am sure you can install the network driver from source as well to work
with 2.4.18.
> So, my first
> question: given the kernel images on
> $MIRROR/Debian/main/k/kernel-image-2.4.26-i386,
> how do I change my kernel?
If you want to upgrade your kernel, you should get a backported kernel
image from backports.org. IIRC you also need to upgrade the
initrd-tools package. The packages in the pool directories on official
mirrors with versione > 2.4.18 are not for Woody.
> I need to pass things back-and-forth between Linux and Windoze. I
> see references to VFAT FS on the web site, but for the life of me, I
> can't find a trace of the software. It's really bad to have to play
> games with tar at both sides of the route in order not to munge up the
> "magic" pathnames. PLEASE don't tell me that the evil beast of
> Redmond has buried VFAT under a patent claim!! If not, please, where
> can I find it?
You need to mount the windows file system. Let's say Windows is
installed on the first primary partition on hard disk one (hda1), you
can do this:
mkdir /mnt/windows
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows
To have the files assigned to your user ID (normally they belong to
root):
mount -t vfat -o uid=1000,id=1000 /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows
(assuming that your user ID is 1000)
To mount the windows file system at boot time automatically, add a line
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
Please take a look at the mount and fstab man pages for details.
If you use NTFS, change vfat to ntfs in the lines above. You can however
nor write to NTFS partitions, except you install captive, which uses
the Windows ntfs driver, but is not part of Debian Woody.
> Right now, I've managed to hork up my package data so dpkg gets
> hung up trying to fix things. My best bet seems to be to restart from
> scratch. How do I get dpkg / apt / aptitude to clean my machine
> totally, or what files should I remove to make all this stuff go away?
> Or, would it really be quicker to re-init my partitions and start
> again from the CD?
I don't know what exactly you did, but maybe you have some usable backup
in /var/backup. However, if the system is freshly installed and you did
not make a lot of manual changes to the configuration, it is probably a
quicker solution to reinstall.
best regards
Andreas Janssen
--
Andreas Janssen <andreas.janssen@bigfoot.com>
PGP-Key-ID: 0xDC801674 ICQ #17079270
Registered Linux User #267976
http://www.andreas-janssen.de/debian-tipps.html
Reply to: