my first hour with debian...

Salutations debian users,

If you do a search on my name, you will see that for the better part of the last year I have been a slackware user.
I recently downloaded a "business card" iso of testing with the new beta installer. The installer worked quite well and here I am after a few hours of waiting for apt to do its thing. I must say that I actually like the old installer better for some sick reason.
So far all I can say is wow. It wasnt the fastest install but I love what I see so far.
I still have a long way to go in getting things nice and tuned for a good desktop computer setup (sound, getting grub to dual boot, etc etc) but I am very impressed none the less. This is far better than any .rpm distro I have ever used and dare I say I am favoring debian over slackware at this point! (I know I'll get alot of flack in irc on that).
I love the pre-installed bookmarks is mozilla, saved me a bit of time. I cant believe the wealth of documentation, newgroups, and community I have seen already.
Well I'm off to play. Catch ya'll later with a question or 10

Originally posted by mipia I must say that I actually like the old installer better for some sick reason.

Don't worry you are not alone with that opinion. I "cut my teeth" on that old installer so I'm use to it by now even though I haven't reinstalled Debian in while though.

Welcome to Debian GNU/Linux! Hope you have an enjoyable experience using it as countless others including myself have.

The old installer was fine, if you knew what the hey you were doing. It was just newbies to linux who really had problems.

its been good so far. Im still trying to figure out how to go about getting 2.6 going. Been reading up on how to get apt-get to go unstable. Maybe there is a different way? Not sure yet.
That and something else kinda puzzling...
no drives in my fstab? LOL I mean no floppy or cdrom. Ah well, I guess I can add those myself.


I have one question though:
At this point I dont have any sound, should I try to fix it now or wait until I figure out how to get 2.6.whatever running?

When you do decide to leap into sound, its worth it to go with ALSA instead of OSS. OSS is on the out, and ALSA is becoming the new standard (Besides, ALSA has OSS emulation)

Check out here for some good stuff on ALSA <http://alsa.opensrc.org/>

Welcome to Debian
Wait until you get 2.6 going and then there's only one thing to choose.. Alsa...
The latest 2.6.5-rc3 or 4 *can't remember* have a note saying that OSS is out of the picture, or something like that

And YES... Me want the old installer back.. I've only seen the new one in pictures and i'm gong to stick with my old cd's and contnue to do netinstalls

Hapy easter, it's time for celebrations *grins*

apt-cache search package
apt-cache search kernel-source (http://debian.org/distrib/packages)
apt-get install kernel-source-2.6.4 module-init-tools ncurses-dev (make menuconfig, etc...)

upgrading(replace sarge with sid if you want the less stable but latest software)
vim /etc/apt/sources.list
:%s/stable/sarge/g
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

VERY COOL!!!

Welcome replies that come with free advice.... wow, way cool.

Ive heard from some that Debian users are snooty, this definatly proves them way wrong. Thanks for the tips everyone.
It might be a while until I touch it again though, harddrive died. Its alright, I just have to save up a few pennies and I should be up and going again soon.
Im sure I'll have a few questions be that time LOL.

THanks again

edit..

accidental post sorry

if u want to compile kernel 2.6 then u better do it the debian way as its easier

check it out here : http://www.desktop-linux.net/debkernel.htm

can someone tell me the easiest way to make ALSA work with Debian ?

I did a net/ftp installation, using "testing" branch, kernel 2.4.25-1-386

then apt-get install alsa-modules-2.4.25-1-386 as well as alsa-base, alsa-utils ....

then I run alsaconf, it recognized my soundcard, and said that it wrote some changes to /etc/modules.conf ... but it failed when loading alsa

I read on some other guides and they said that I should turn off the currently turned on OSS , or the ALSA couldn't be started

I find in /etc/modules.conf and delete the line refer to OSS, and just left those ALSA conf just inserted, but the next time when I reboot, OSS is still being loaded

I also use "rmmod ... " to unload the sound module, but it said those modules are "busy"

and one more issue, sometime after apt-get install alsa, it said something "stat /etc/alsa/1.0 " , but sometimes it refers to "/etc/alsa/0.9" ,

so I must do "ln /etc/alsa/1.0 /etc/alsa/0.9" or something like that to make it work ..

last question, how can i completely remove ALSA ? (to start a new clean and fresh install .. )

thanks

Well, first off, debian is a little diffrent when it comes to handling modules. Module configurations go in individual files under /etc/modprobe.d/. update-modules will then create /etc/modprobe.conf from all the files in modprobe.d. SO you need to add the alsa configuration to modprobe.d/
make sure that the values in /etc/alsa.conf work for you. (oss load is ususally a good thing, unless you are having serious issues.