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David A. Cobb wrote:
Hi!
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. 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?
Don't bother about the NVidia patches just yet: they'll give you 3D but
2D should work. If all else fails, use the "vesa" driver until you can
go further.
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?
It's a loadable kernel module.
insmod vfat as root should do it.
Then potentially just add vfat to the end of /etc/modules - it'll load
the next time you boot.
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?
OK. It _may_ be quicker to start again: on the other hand, if you can
point out some of the errors, someone may be able to help you sort out
dselect.
Thanks, all, for your patience. I hope I see some answers before I
do something more silly than what I've already done here.
No problem - we all had to work this stuff out sometime :)
Andy C
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