Re: PCMCIA Wireless Card startup problems under Debian Sid
Jochen Schulz wrote:
James Caldow:
I was happy like this for a while and was loving everything about
Debian. Then I began to get adventurous. I wanted to see what I was
missing with Debian Sid. I liked the idea of more up to date software
and a more current development environment to play with.
If you plan to stay with sid, please install apt-listbugs and
apt-listchanges. They can display bugreports, changelogs and news items
when installing or upgrading packages.
<lecture mode="curtain">
Please note that using sid sometimes requires you to work around minor
or major problems yourself. By using sid you implicitly agree not to
whine about broken software and to report problems to the bts
(bugs.debian.org).
Whilst I appreciate that you have specified that you are in lecture mode
I would also point out that at no point in my email have I whined about
the software being "broken". I encountered a problem that I could not
resolve by myself or by searching, and instead of whining about it I
came here to ask for help.
That also means that you are expected to fix a lot of things yourself,
at least on your own system. If you have been reading this list for some
time, you might have noticed some hostility towards (obvious) newbies
using sid when they are seeking help for "trivial" problems.
As I said in my email I am not exactly a newbie, nor do I claim to know
everything. I am simply looking for a solution and had hoped that
someone could help. I have used various open-source mailing lists in the
past and continue to do so. I regularly use the mailing lists for Opie,
Familiar, and GPE (Linux on Ipaqs) which can hardly be described as
pedestrian or straightforward. At no time during my membership there
have I been told that a problem was trivial, or that I shouldn't be
asking a question in the first place.
That said, nobody expects you to know everything, but you should know
some basic Debian documentation (See http://debian.org/doc for the FAQ
and Reference) and you should follow news and announcements because some
of them directly affect sid. The mailing lists debian-announce,
debian-devel-announce and debian-news might be of interest.
Even if you don't understand everything (esp. in d-d-a), you get a good
impression of how the project works and you will be warned in advance
when sid is undergoing significant changes.
</lecture>
Thank you for the advice. In fact I did read through all the
documentation available at Debian.org prior to even installing Sarge.
That was what convinced me to give it a go. I liked what Debian stood
for and what it had to offer. I will also give the lists you mention a look.
Using a Sarge net-install disc I set about the install process again
Of course it is too late now, but: except for downgrades or totally
hosed systems, there is no need to reinstall. Upgrading to sid or etch
is as easy as adding the appropriate lines to your sources.list and
'aptitude dist-upgrade'.
If only it were that simple. I had been trying to avoid my original
email becoming too long, but prior to installing in the manner described
above I had tried to apt-get dist-upgrade two seperate machines from
Sarge to Sid. In both cases it choked on things like udev, dpkg, etc. I
found plenty of info on workarounds for these issues by googling but
they were all incredibly brute force workarounds to my way of thinking
and I simply wanted to try installing the system cleanly using Sid
sources from the start. As I said, I have installed various linux
distributions over the years, and feel comfortable enough with the whole
process that a clean install doesn't phase me too much.
I wish that the apt-get dist-upgrade had worked as it is supposed to,
but I wasn't too surprised when it didn't as we are talking about a
fairly major change going from Sarge to Sid.
and using the expert options I selected the unstable sources. After
flying through all of the initial setup tasksel choked on the desktop
environment task. It would complain incessantly about unmet
dependencies with the Openoffice.org-kde package.
That may be related to the current transition to OpenOffice.org 2.0 in
sid. Many of the older extra packages for OOo aren't necessary anymore,
but probably the tasks (which were designed for sarge) haven't been
updated.
Again, that's pretty much what I expected. Going down the Sid route I
wasn't expecting to be held by the hand and allowed to use things like
tasksel without a hitch.
The problem started after a reboot. When the laptop rebooted the
Wireless card powered on but wouldn't connect. Once logged in I had to
manually do "ifup eth1" as root to get connected. Not a huge deal, but
annoying enough if you have to do it after every reboot!
If all you need is to ifup the device, you are probably just missing an
'auto ethX' line in your /etc/network/interfaces. man 5 interfaces.
And now the crux of the question. When I get home I will try what you
suggest and I thank you for taking the time to answer. I just hope that
if I run into any more serious problems in the future I can find the
solution elsewhere. I dread to think what abuse I will bring upon myself
if I decide to ask for help here.
James Caldow
J.
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