[lug] debian

[Hugh Brown]

On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 16:39, David Morris wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 02:26:47PM -0600, Peter Hutnick wrote:
> > Hugh Brown said:
> > > I'm beginning to play with debian and haven't had a whole lot of luck.
> > >
> > > I did a net install with the floppies and got woody installed.
> > > Unfortunately, it doesn't know what to do with my video card (Nvidia Ge
> > > Force 2 Go) nor my wireless card.
> > >
> > > I tried dselect'ing a 2.4 kernel but every time I boot into it, the
> > > system won't respond to keyboard input.
> > >
> > > I added testing to my sources.list and did a dist-upgrade.  Booting into
> > > the 2.4 kernel still got my to a system that wouldn't respond to
> > > keyboard input.
> > 
> > At the risk of setting off the Debianistas, this is not an atypical "end
> > user" experience with Debian.
> > 
> > Debian focuses on Freedom and (extreme) stability.  These are admirable,
> > but make it hard on a guy who is hoping to run contemporary hardware and
> > have it "just work."
> 
> See my other post for details, but this is not quite the
> correct reason the hardware doesn't "just work" out of the
> box.  The support in this case *is already there* (though
> the NVidia drivers are better), but they are not loaded by
> default.  This creates a much cleaner and faster system, at
> the expense of more needed user knowledge.  There are
> HOWTOs, FAQs, and guides all over the place to give the tiny
> bit of extra knowledge needed if you just look for it.

I did go to the effort of reconfiguring XFree86 to use the nv driver but
I just got red and green blinking vertical lines.

> 
> I have yet to find any hardware that runs on RH that cannot
> run on Debian.  95% of the time all you have to do is load
> the appropriate module (which is already installed)....the
> other 5% of the time, Linux support is so iffy in the first
> place, not even RH can get it to "just work" for a novice
> user.
> 

I assumed the same, which is why I installed debian.  I would like to
get debian to work for a couple of reasons:  security releases won't
stop one year after the version is released (my primary reason) and apt.

Also, I wouldn't classify myself as a novice (not that you were
insinuating that).  I think it fair to say that the dialect of Linux
that Debian speaks is a fair bit different than the commercial Linux
distributions.

In any event, I would like to know the shortest path to installing a
debian system with a 2.4 kernel and XFree 4.3 or later.

I can reinstall or I can start with an install that has been
dist-upgraded to testing.


Also, where can I find the dpkg equivalents of 

rpm -qa
rpm -qi
rpm -ql

Hugh