[vox-tech] What's in RedHat 8.0

[Michael Wenk]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick Moen" <rick@linuxmafia.com>
To: <vox-tech@lists.lugod.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 06, 2002 1:54 PM
Subject: Re: [vox-tech] What's in RedHat 8.0


> 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.

That is the funny thing.  I have a stock PCI 64 SB card.  A long time
ago(but not a galaxy far far away) I ran slackware under some 2.0 or 2.2
kernel, and the es1370(or es1371) driver worked fine, and it sounded great.
Enter a few iterations, and the card has been reborn in a different box, and
the es137X driver works, but there is an annoying buzz.  A friend of mine
has the same card and he doesn't have this issue.  However, the funny thing
is if I run it with the alsa driver, it sounds and works fine.  I should
probably just get a new card, and I probably will eventually(which means its
not likely to ever happen.)  Maybe if I ever update my game system, Ill
snake its card and retire this guy.

>
> [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.)

I might have missed that, and your right, I did tell debian to install a 2.4
kernel.  I had some network issues(which turned out to be issues with me
misreading a config file) which caused me to wonder if I had the right tulip
driver(a problem which has bitten me in the past, and is solved by updating
to the latest kernel.)  I even downloaded and installed a later kernel for
the same thing b4 I discovered my actual problem.  But that's good in some
ways, because I really prefer my IDE CD drive to run under the SCSI driver,
and it makes more sense to me to modularize the driver rather than tell it
not to bind to my drive.

> > 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.  ;->

Heh, I *could* go into intimate detail about why I much prefer EIDE over
SCSI, but Ill skip it :)

>
> 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.

Last few times I installed debian I used the debian CD, but for woody and
because its such a damn pain in the rear to download the CD, I went with a
minimal CD install, which actually worked well, However the more I think
about it I think I would rather go the linux from scratch way.  Im not
really entirely sure why, maybe its just to try it, maybe something else...

Just out of curiousity, have you ever made a linux system that way?