I have now been living with a Linux desktop (Debian3/KDE2) for a week or so, and it's been interesting. I've had some good times, and some bad times. I've got most things working including Apache, but I've not even attempted to port my Perl scripts over from my NT4 system yet...
Of late the biggest pain has been getting the printer installed and working, and sound to work at all. I tried CUPS, but that was not successful, but I think I've now got plain old BSD lpr/lpd working with the right filters, I just have to get them shared properly with Samba and my other half will be happy. My sound card is a SoundBlaster AWE32, which was a jolly pain to get working under NT4 at all, so I'm not expecting that to be any easier...
Tomorrow there is a Hampshire LUG meeting in town, so I hope to go along and find people who know more about Debian than I do, before they get too drunk to remember any of it!
Re:sound on netbsd
ajt on 2003-11-01T10:52:13
If only! From what I recall trying to get this card working under NT4, it's a realy bitch. Basically it's an early PnP* card, and doesn't take to well to none PnP OSes like NT4, or the generation of motherboard I have. SoundBlaster are on revision 10 for the NT4 driver, but I must confess that I only ever got version 4 to work, everything after that screwed things up.
I know it's possible to get it to play ball, because I did have it "beeping" under RedHat 5 and 6, but not without pain. I will have to study the documentation and work though, it's usually a case of actually following the instructions in the right order and it should work okay...
Overall I must say that Debian install SUCKS compared to RedHat or NT4. However once the basics are working apt-get is great, and seems to be behaving very well. Thankfully I should only need one install, on this box, and when I do it next on another box I'll be a lot more experienced!
* PnP: Plug and Prey
Re:Slackware
ajt on 2003-11-01T10:45:17
So far I've got my printer working okay. In the end I went for a standard BSD lpd/lpr install, with a selection of filters. It works fine from my RedHat 6 machine, and with Samba to my partner's Win98 notebook. It even started fine when I rebooted this morning, I've had false starts before where it worked fine until the following morning....
Next the AWE32 driver. As far as I can tell it should work, I simply download the awe-drv package, rebuild my kernel, and hey-presto!. So far it's not been that simple, the package claims it can't find the
.SBK files, but they are in the correct place, so I don't know what that means. Another challenge to keep me busy. Re:Slackware
Mr. Muskrat on 2003-11-01T14:18:34
Oh! You said AWE32! I never tried using one of those with linux. I did however have great luck with an AWE64 under several distros.
Good luck to you!
Re:Slackware
ajt on 2003-11-01T14:40:44
I'll need luck, it's an old bad tempered card, which was awkward enough to set up on NT4, let alone Linux. Once it's been bullied into submission, it's not actually that bad, well it beeps and plays audio CDs and MP3/OGG files okay.
