The wife was not around on Saturday, meaning I had the
entire day pretty much to myself. :-) So I deleted my
LinuxPPC root & /usr partitions and tried the install
again. This time, it worked.
I'm working through a few glitches (see below), but
overall I'm glad I did it. The new install is noticeably
faster than the old one, and the Mach64 video configured
without a hitch. Even the 3D stuff seems to be working.
KDE is now fast enough for me to use regularly, although
I still want to hunt down some AfterStep RPMs for it.
And -- woohoo! -- the scroll wheel works on my USB
mouse now!
I grabbed the apt package from YDL's FTP and did an
upgrade, it works GREAT. No more wrestling with
dependencies!
Like I said, I ran into several glitches:
For whatever reason, modprobe didn't pick up the USB
printer. Doing insmod blah/drivers/usb/printer.o took
care of that, so I added that command to rc.local. The
next problem was that lpd couldn't open /dev/usb/lp0
(permissions problem). The brute-force "solution"
was to chmod 0666 /dev/usb/lp0 but I'm going to try
taking it back to 0660 and setting its group to lp. I took
the kludgey way out because I *had* to get the church
bulletin printed right away & was in too much of a hurry
to think of a better way.
Stuff I *haven't* solved yet --
The first time I log in after a reboot, KDE gives an error
dialog involving a problem with /dev/dsp (I didn't write
down the exact text, sorry). Log out & back in, sound works.
Kicker (KDE's panel) crashes on startup. If I try starting it
from a command line, it spits out a "crashHandler called"
error and the return code is 255. Deleting the kickerrc file
allows it to start. I suspect this isn't a widespread problem;
the slightest amount of testing would have caught it otherwise.
I enabled NFS, and it whines & moans at boot time, wastes a
lot of time, and won't start. It's more of a convenience than
an absolute necessity, so I haven't started prodding at it yet.
GTK-based apps have this awful dark grey background that
makes text hard to read. I understand that it's a theme thing,
but I haven't found a theme selector for GTK yet. Is that one
of those things you need Gnome for?
I'll probably run into other stuff as I go -- I haven't
started setting up netatalk, the 3am email run, or the
cutting-edge versions of things I use a lot. But a Linux
system is a continual work in progress; that's part of
what makes it fun.
--
Larry Kollar, Senior Technical Writer, ARRIS
"Content creators are the engine that drives
value in the information life cycle."
-- Barry Schaeffer, on XML-Doc
--
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