I am diving head first into Linux, but have done very little work with Unix in my career except a tiny but at University.
My immediate problem is that I can't get network cards working under my Corel linux (or my sound card -- an inland Sound Card PCI 128 Wave Table -- but I'm prepared to leave that one for later). I have bought two cards now. Both have had me download .c versions of the tulip drivers, and neither of them would compile for my Debian variant O/S. I have tried reinstalling the OS from scratch after installing each set of cards, but it didn't help. I can see the cards in the control Center's ftp setup, and I can set options for it, but when I do ifconfig -a, all I get is the loopback. Plus, the control center sees only card and there are two. If you feel like commenting, the first thing I want this thing to do is run NAT, so if that is relevant to this discussion, please say so. I have a home-built ABP Dual-celeron 400 (couldn't get 366's any more) machine, with a downloaded Corel Linux distrib. So my immediate question is: I need to know what to do with the tulip.c file I got from Bay Networks for my Netgear FA 310TX cards (I have two, so I can run this thing as a NAT machine). The metaquestion, which might be more useful to me in the long run, is: How do I translate instructions about compiling for RedHat or Slackware into instructions for Debian? Specific questions, which might or might not be the right ones: - do I compile for a module or a monolithic kernel? - after hours spent reading the /usr/doc stuff, I tried to compile, but I found that one of the make files referred to a bunch of files that didn't actually exist (at least, not in the locations given in the file; and the first few I searched for didn't exist *at all* -- I know, I searched). I found a bug report on this one (#32456 -- http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/debian/Bugs/db/32/32456-b.html), but I can find nowhere to search for responses to these bug reports. The metametaquestion is where is the best place to find answers to these sorts of questions for myself. I spent most of yesterday trying to work this one out for myself. I visited a couple of hundred web pages, and read a significant proportion of the /usr/doc stuff, but I am no wiser about why the arrangement of the files in Debian is clearly very different to those in Redhat, what that means for compiling for Debian, etc. And I have a cable modem. This time was almost entirely spent reading stuff that didn't answer my questions. I like the philosophy of Debian, but if everything I get is going to be set up for Redhat, and if adapting them to Debian is going to be hard, I might have to give up on debian and go with Red Hat. I'd rather not, though! TIA Help!!!