I've been tinkering some more with Debian today, but I haven't accomplished much of anything. Here are a few notes:
I have to remember to compile the nVidia modules every time I compile a new kernel. Not a big deal, but I forgot once.
I can't recompile a kernel using fakeroot after compiling it as root. I guess the permissions get changed. (Oh well.)
When sharing a partition between two Linux installations, uids need to be the same in both. This is important because I have a partition which gets mounted as /home in both Mandrake and Debian. My uid was 501 in Mandrake and 1000 in Debian, which meant that I couldn't properly access my files in Debian. So I changed my uid in Debian to 501, which worked except that for some reason, then kdm wouldn't display my username because my uid was too low. Not a big deal, but it was not a big deal to reboot into Mandrake, change my uid and gid to 1000, and chown my home directory and files. Whew.
As I said, not a big deal, but it's one of those picky little things that I didn't think about before.
There's still a lot to do. Here are just a few of the problems I want to work on:
I don't understand Netenv. The problem that really confuses me is that although the installer set up my network without a problem, and the default kernel doesn't have any problem connecting, I can't do anything with my custom kernels. (Jeff insists that the problem is not the kernel, but he doesn't know Debian.) I'm thoroughly confused.
Configure Microsoft Explorer wheel mouse to use USB.
Enable support for the correct sound card in the kernel (accidental misconfiguration)
Get penggy working, if at all possible. Failing that, get a Real ISP very soon. Actually, get a Real ISP anyway.
Aquarion says:
You shouldn't need to compile the kernel very often. Remember that if you're just adding modules to it, you can run "make modules; make modules_install" to just compile the relevant bits.
fakeroot thing, yes. It compiles everything, then puts them all together, so if you run as fakeroot you can't access (and therefore change) the things that were created as root, let alone overwrite the final image.
If you're sharing a linux installation between two drives, it's possibly worth putting /etc/passwd in the same place (That is, one is a symlink to t'other) so that you don't have to muck around with that kind of thing. *ideal* solution is to have a second computer be an LDAP auth server, but this is a pipe-dream thing that even I haven't done yet :-)
I am not wise in the ways of Netenv, for it is subtle and will pee on your computer. Occasionally the Debian Wiki (http://wiki.debian.net/) can help with things like this, but this time it doesn't. Try the mailing-list debian-user (Debian user is high traffic, so I'd recommend adding gmane (http://www.gmane.org) to your news feeds and reading it via that.
MS USB Mice... Oh, I can help with that.
From my X11 config, which uses a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer:
Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Configured Mouse" Driver "mouse" Option "CorePointer" Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice" Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSectionFinally, realISPs considered non-harmful :-)
Laurabelle says:
I know I shouldn't have to compile the kernel very often, but I keep discovering that I've left out support for something I need! For example, I picked the wrong soundcard support by accident, and I left out TUN/TAP (which is needed by penggy if I'm to have any chance of making it work). It's a blessing that it only takes a few minutes to compile a kernel on this machine.
I'm not going to muck with sharing /etc/passwd, because the problem's solved for the moment. /home is the only really shared partition, and it's not like I ever create users, anyway. Jeff and I are the only ones who will ever use Delilah.
Incidentally, being able to write data on my Debian partition from Mandrake is really handy. It means I don't have to bother with rescue disks or single-user mode in order to change config files. Woohoo.
It turns out that I'm running a very old version of netenv (duh, it's the Debian stable version, 0.82 vs. 0.94) and that 0.94 fixes a DHCP-related bug! Yay! So I'm upgrading to the Debian-unstable 0.94, and I'll also try someone else's config files to see if they work better.
Thanks for your example config. I think the mouse is more or less working with PS/2, but I'd like to get it working better.
I should have a Real ISP in about a month, I think. Either my landlords will move from AOL, or I will stop sharing DSL with them and solve the problem myself.
(P.S. My speel-chucker breaks into , which is not half bad.)
Senji says:
Particularly not given the etymology of the name (from Deborah and Ian)... :-)
Laurabelle says:
That's exactly what I meant!