Hey all!!!
Desperately wanting to run Debian on my little nForce shuttle box. I got the shuttle so I could lug it to a Linux installfest in my area, but I haven't found any. I'm shaky on kernel compiling (mixed result every time) and still a little new at it all. I want to "graduate" from fedora, especially after watching the wonderful documentary Revolution OS that I can't recommend enough. I've always been enamoured of Debian, but I was supercharged by RMS!

Okay, onto my question! I downloaded net and vid drivers from the nforce website, but the compile seems to be geared for a "RED Hat" (ugh) directory structure. So, I will probably have to do some advanced "twiddling" with some makefiles. Not too familiar with that, but I'm sure I could follow any help/advice you'd care to give.


the driver archive is called:

NVIDIA_nforce-1.0233.tar.gz

Specifically what happens is when I run tar xzvf on the driver archive, I get the error message:

tar: nforce: Cannot change ownership to uid 501, gid 4: operation not permitted

tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Now, for the first error, you may substitute the name of every driver in the tree: audio, video, net, etc . The same error repeats for each and fills the screen. Yet, the driver tree appears to be at least partially populated by the tar action. There is an "nforce" directory which has a Makefile (capital M) in it, and nvet and audio subdirs that also have Makefiles. When I try running ./Makefile in each of those directories I get a series of Makefile erros.

./Makefile: MODULE_NAME: command not found
./Makefile: SRC: command not found


etc etc, ad nauseum. And usually the terminal will lock, though other terminal sessions will still launch.

I've also tried distros Potato, Sarge and Sid. Potato seems to install and run just as unreliably with these driver files as Woody, and both Sid and Sarge (I've downloaded ISO after ISO and jigoed my BRAINS out!) blow up everytime during mid installation.

All I want is a little peace, love, nic and X Winders with maybe a little GNOME sprinked on top! Is that too much to ask for? If I'll have to pick my poison though, I'd rather go with just nic so I can have a nice GNU/Debian server on the internet happilly fulfilling http, ftp, and ssh requests!!!

MAJOR mojo wickedness. HEEEELP!!!

uhhh... debian makes kernel compiling super easy. And if i'm not mistaken, the 2.6 kernel has nforce drivers.

http://myrddin.org/howto/debian-kernel-recompile.html change 2.4.24 to 2.6.5, and skip the patch part, and your on your way!

Hey, thanks man! I should have clarified that most of my kernel building experience comes from other distros, and it is to debian that I am truly new. But I'm sure the process is similar. Problems I ran into in the past in clude getting NTFS r/w support, and again that was on other distros. For other stuff I'm usuall fine, as long as I have a nice O'Reilly book with me.

But, luckily, I just was able to jigdo WORKING ISOs of Sarge. I think, if I'm not mistakenl, that this "unstable" release has the newer kernel that should work on my hardware. I'm giving it a try right now. Thanks again!

well if it the prebuild kernel doesn't work :
running
#cp /boot/config-2.6.5-1-k7 /usr/src/linux/.config
#make oldconfig

sets up the old config, so you can make changes to what you need and keep the rest. (debian always uses modules if available except for compressed ram file system)