Subjects are a good thing ;) On Mon, 21 Jun 1999, Corey Carroll wrote:
> Greetings..I purchased Debian 2.1 from the UTArlington bookstore. I > thought that it was 2.0 originally, because that's what the manual said, > but then the people who work there opened it up, and it has 4 2.1 disks: > 2 binaries, 2 sources. Don't know too much about installing from CDs (i installed from floppy images downloaded from www.debian.org, then upgraded over the net), so i can't help with this. I'm sure others will answer these concerns... > I chose Debian because > 1. I wanted to try something new Good reason! > 2. I had heard that it is more stable than redhat--redhat always upgrades > their > packages no matter what, and debian chooses the stable > versions of packages (hearsay on my part) Don't know much about this, although i consider Debian's package management and stability much nicer. > 3. I had hoped that it could upgrade itsef automatically from the net, as new > versions of debian came out. It can! And very easily, too. > 4. It's less commercial and more free (vs. Redhat) Not sure about this one either. > Another confusing part is that after the packages are installed, it goes and > configures each one...some of these things it is configuring I've never > heard of before. Again, a new user would have significant problems here. When i first installed, i was completely new to Linux. i just accepted the defaults for everything when it was first installed, and changed things later as i figured out how they worked. i don't think a new user would have many problems here... > Luckily, I have 2 6 GIG hard drives, so I can install a new debian > without destroying my old one. With the old one, I chose some kind of > default install, and seemed to get it to work OK (it's what I'm typing > it on now). i did something like that with my initial Debian install... "Standard workstation" or something like that. > I was able to compile a new kernel (what is the debian way to do > this?!?! I had a .tar.gz file with kernel sources in usr/src..am I > supposed to install it through dselect or dpkg??), Read the Debian FAQ, Section 11 tells about recompiling the kernels. The was i usually do it, i download the source or patch from kernel.org, put it in /usr/src (or copy and patch the old tree). Then i use make-kpkg from the kernel-package package. > and compile x11amp (after compiling glib and gtk+). It's xmms now ;) And i must say, the default skin in 0.9.1 looks _very_ nice! (the default skin in 0.9, on the other hand, is very ugly) > With the new one, I couldn't compile glib in order to get x11amp to > compile...again, pretty frustrating. Because the version in stable was too low for xmms, right? Stable is just that: not bleeding edge, but software that's been tested and proven to work without any major bugs. I follow the unstable tree (obligatory warning: unstable could easily hose my system and erase my hard drive, or have less-serious breakage. i have been warned. i also file bug reports.), which has the latest glib and gtk+ libraries and headers and gave me no problem in compiling xmms 0.9.1. If you didn't want to move to unstable, you could always grab the sources from the unstable tree and compile them into deb files on your slink system. It's an easy process (as long as you have all the proper -dev headers installed...) Read section 7.13 of the Debian FAQ for details. > I had to set up the symlinks in /usr/include/linux /usr/include/asm > manually (a new user would have no idea). Actually, you did it wrong. On a Debian system, the libc6-dev package provides known functional versions of those headers, instead of symlinking into a kernel source tree. For more details and rationale, read the debian.README.gz file from any kernel-headers package, or the /usr/lib/kernel-package/README.headers file installed with kernel-package. > Also, I use a unique way to get on the internet. I dial into my > school's terminal server, login to it, and then telnet freeshell.org, [[[SNIP]]] > script to run pppd and call my chatscript from within pppd. Now, debian > doesn't seem to like my shellscript- You could try posting the script and the error it generates, along with the desrciption of its purpose that i snipped. > (max connect speed shows 33600) Where do you find the max connect speed in Linux? i've been looking, and i can't find where to find it!
