I thought that I *was* root when I was installing a distribution, otherwise it wouldn't let me install packages in the first place?

As for my laptop manual, most of them are useless nowadays because they come with no technical information as they assume you're going to follow the nice included Windows XP installation guide which will hold your hand every step of the way towards selling your soul to Microsoft.

As for doing R&D, I still don't understand why Debian can't detect my hardware automatically when every other distro can (even Gentoo does a better job, and that's saying something).

install kudzu on your system (apt-get install kudzu) It should detect your card.

Siddhesh

I've given up on Debian for the moment. Perhaps if the development team creates an installer than actually *works* properly and detects my hardware without having to mess around with modprobes and the like I'll go back to it. Until then, Slackware actually works - which is the most important thing.