Re: Etch is REALLY fast! :-)

[Dave Witbrodt <dawitbro@sbcglobal.net>]

Liam O'Toole wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Jan 2007 23:10:25 -0500
> Dave Witbrodt <dawitbro@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
> [...]
>  
> >    I thought it was particularly hilarious that I had to recompile my 
> > entire kernel, whereas my original decision to upgrade to Etch was 
> > intended to allow me to preserve it.  Sarge runs XFree86, but my new 
> > video card required a new driver blob and kernel module.  The Etch 
> > upgrade, of course, installed XOrg and the module I had compiled for 
> > Sarge was targetting XFree86.  I thought I could just compile a new 
> > kernel module, but then realized that I had just installed a new 
> > version of 'gcc'.  I got "gcc version 4.1.2 ..." when I ran 'gcc -v', 
> > but I had compiled my kernel with gcc 3.3.5.
> >    So, I had a fresh '.config' file to use, and just recompiled the 
> > whole kernel along with the ATI module -- it only took about 15 
> > minutes.  Later, I realized that there is also a 'gcc-3.3' package on 
> > my system, and probably could have just compiled the ATI module alone 
> > after all.  (Sometimes ya gotta learn the hard way!)
>
> [...]
>
> I'm sure that was a valuable learning experience, but there is an
> easier way of installing the ATI drivers. See the packages
> fglrx-driver and fglrx-kernel-src, both in the non-free section. The
> latter can be auto-installed using module-assistant.


  Thanks for the tip.  As it turns out I already knew about this. 
It's just that AMD/ATI just released a brand new driver package this 
month, and I wanted that:

	dawitbro@P4WRK:~$ apt-cache policy fglrx-kernel-src
	fglrx-kernel-src:
	  Installed: 8.33.6-1
	  Candidate: 8.33.6-1
	  Version table:
	 *** 8.33.6-1 0
	        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
	     8.28.8-4 0
	        400 http://debian.uchicago.edu etch/non-free Packages

Installed is the new proprietary package, 8.33 ; the Etch archive 
contains 8.28.  (It's very likely that I wouldn't have noticed any 
difference, though, unless my card was not supported by 8.28 or 
something.  It was NOT supported yet in 8.23.)


Thanks again,
DW