| christophe barbé on Sat, 5 Jan 2002 14:40:17 +0100 |
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On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 08:48:18PM -0500, Michael F. Robbins wrote: > Ah, finally tonight my system is to such a point of usability that I can get my > e-mail again. ;-) Nice. > > For anyone that is interested: I started with a plain Debian Woody install. I > custom-compiled kernel 2.4.17, from a config I had made before with RedHat. > Works great. I didn't use make-kpkg or anything, as I really didn't want to > spend the time and didn't see the benefit. You should really try. It will greatly simplify your kernel upgrade. I usually upgrade to the last stable kernel by simply untaring the source and copying the .config from the one and then call 'make-kpkg --revision custom.1 binary_kernel binary_modules' and everything is build including modules from source that are not in the kernel like alsa. Make-kpkg can take care of patches to be applied ... > > I have an NVIDIA GeForce card. Grabbed source tarballs from NVidia's site, > compiled, works great. Actually, I think my Quake III frames per second have > gone up! I really can't explain that, but I really think they have. Yes, I > know that there are some Debian packages for setting up the NVidia modules, but > after playing with them unsucessfully, I just did what I had done before on > redhat. And it works great. IMHO tarball and debian do not fit well together. Each time you use a tarball instead of a debian package, you decrease the power of debian and its managment of dependencies (i.e. you broke dependencies). > > Oh, and of course installed my Q3A. No problems there ;-) > > I used apt-get to install KDE, which is what I am using as my desktop. There > was a small dependency problem in installing SSL support for KDE, which > involved using dpkg --force-overwrite once, but I'm sure that this will be > resolved soon. And it was quite simple to resolve. (Two KDE packages claim > the same file: just overwrite it.) If you want recent software, you certainly will be happier with sid. Then you will no more have to download manually from it (and btw there's other solution to do that with sources.list). I understand that you have previously used rpm with its required '--nodeps' and '--force' but I had never used this kind of thing with debian and like tarball this is clearly not the debian way. > I grabbed StarOffice 5.2, and had no problems installing it. Works great for > schoolwork. > > Apt-getted CUPS (Common Unix Printing System, the focus of waltman's upcoming > April presentation). I'd seriously recommend CUPS to anyone using any distro > -- it makes things very easy. > > Installed (Ximian) Evolution. This was a (relatively) complicated operation, > and yet still took all of maybe 15 minutes. Went to debian.org, saw evolution > package in SID (the unstable tree). Looked at dependency list. Installed as > much as I could from testing. For the other 3 packages, again found > dependencies manually. Downloaded, did dpkg -i evolution_blablabla.deb. Works > great! Could you configured it to send plain text e-mail to mailing-lists like this one. > So basically, I'm now 100% using Debian for everyday use. And yes, I did > figure out how to install to RAID (slightly complicated, e-mail me for > details). And while sometimes I had to get down and dirty with /etc files and > manually resolving dependencies for some weird packages (Evolution), the > simplicity of apt-get really helped. > > Here are some Deb-specific commands that I've found very helpful: > apt-get update Gets latest package list from servers > apt-get upgrade Grabs&installs latest packages (do update first) > apt-get install foo Grabs&installs package foo > apt-get remove foo Removes foo, but leaves config files > apt-cache search foo Searches package lists for "foo" > apt-cache show foo Shows package information for (uninstalled) pkg "foo" > dpkg -i whatever.deb Installs the package contained in whatever.deb > dpkg -L foo List files associated with package foo > dpkg --contents whatever.deb Show files in (uninstalled) pkg file > update-rc.d Look this up in a man page. Anyway, its useful for setting > runlevel-specific stuff. > > I'm sure you all have many more tricks, but this is good enough for me right > now. If anyone would like more information on how I switched to Debian, please > e-mail me. And even though I spent about a whole week in transition, it was > worth it. I feel so good inside every time "apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade" > installs a new update! Welcome in the debian community. I'm convinced that you will never go back to less powerfull systems like the ones rpm-based. So my advice: . Avoid tarball . Never install broken deb, instead send a bug against the broken package and if you can't wait try to solve it yourself. . Try kernel-package Also note that it's simple to build a package from a tarball and then install it. It will be better for your dependencies and the build process will be safer. Look at 'dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot' and you will see why it's safer that the common practice. Friendly, Christophe > Michael F. Robbins > mike@gamerack.com > -- Christophe Barbé <christophe.barbe@ufies.org> GnuPG FingerPrint: E0F6 FADF 2A5C F072 6AF8 F67A 8F45 2F1E D72C B41E Attachment:
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