[vox-tech] What's in RedHat 8.0

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Wenk (mikewenk@attbi.com):

> One example I had on my system is configuring and running alsa.

Suggestion:  "apt-get install sndconfig".  That's that very nice little
gadget from Red Hat Software.  Also, try the suggestions in 
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/debian-hardware-detection 
("apt-get install discover mdetect read-edid"), just on the general
principle that they make "dpkg-reconfigure" smarter.

Of course, sometimes alsa's support just isn't great for some sound
chipsets.  That's why we still have OSS/Lite and OSS.

[No-root-filesystem error after reboot:]

> Apparently the first time thru, the message to add and initrd line got
> lost (I likely either just did not read it, or something happened to
> make it go away b4 I could read it.)

You must have gone from a 2.2 kernel to a 2.4 one.  The latter were the
first to be packaged so as to put crucial drivers into an intial
RAMdisk.

Debian won't change your kernel version on its own initiative:  If you
installed 2.2.19-1 originally, apt-get will merely upgrade you to new
packaging of the same kernel, as they appear in your development branch
(2.2.19-2, 2.2.19-3, etc.).

These days, if you're installing a _new_ Debian system, might as well
specify a 2.4 "boot flavour" right inside the installer.  (My
understanding is that Debian haven't adopted 2.4.x as the standard
installation kernel because of problems on some of the 11 supported CPU
architectures, but the various installer images for woody/3.0 tend to 
offer 2.4.x as an option.)

> Which also gives me another one of what I consider to be debian's
> shortcomings.  Mandrake 8.1 was the first linux system I had installed that
> actually out of the box set up the IDE CDRW drive properly, ie it used SCSI
> rather than IDE to access it, and even set up the /dev/sr devices(when I had
> debian, I actually had 2 CD drives on this guy) properly.  Debian seems to
> not do such stuff.

Probably so.  Me, I just use SCSI.  ;->

However, I'll bet that both the Libranet and Progeny installer images,
which both allow you to get directly onto woody/3.0 painlessly and get
all the "desktop" proprietary stuff easily, would take those extra
measures for you.

Yesterday, just to make sure I can help people with them, I rebuilt
one of my scratch machines with, in succession, RH 8, UnitedLinux beta3,
Lycoris Desktop/LX build 51 beta, and finally Libranet -- which I then
cut over to Debian "testing" by just adjusting /etc/apt/sources.list and
re-running apt-get.  

They're all pretty good in various ways, I must say.

-- 
Cheers,      "Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first
Rick Moen     woman she meets, and then teams up with three complete strangers
rick@linuxmafia.com       to kill again."  -- Rick Polito's That TV Guy column,
              describing the movie _The Wizard of Oz_