Starting Debian Woody - a few quick questions - was Re: [LUG] Super Methane Brothers

[Simon Waters <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Seems I cured my Super Methane Brothers habit with a Debian CD,
which happily obliterated my Mandrake partition (with a minimal
encouragement).

Hmm so far so painful ;-)

It made a decent stab at setting up XF86, but then put a
stupidly low vertical refresh rate in the XF86Config, so I got a
screen about large enough for the KDM login panel. Okay that was
fixed easily if you know XF86. It also defaulted to using
acceleration, which give me weird errors on the ATI Rage
Mobility - guess I should contribute to XF86 sometime to fix
this.

On starting KDM I get an error about /dev/dsp and no sound, not
even a bell (although I can choose to use the system bell okay).

All other recent distro's just found the audio settings on my
laptop - so how do I kick it to make it try again on finding and
setting up sound?

Is it true the default Debian kernel 2.2 (?!) ships without
'NET_CONFIG_RADIO' enabled? I can't persuade wvlan_cs to work
correctly, it claims to create netdevice eth0, and I can't rmmod
wvlan_cs till I 'ifconfig eth0 down', but 'iwconfig' doesn't
recognise it as a wireless card, so I figure it must be the
kernel settings.

I installed 2.4.18 Kernel sourcs from CD, is it best to just
build a kernel from these? Or can I stay within the package
manager, and well trodden paths - Kai was saying us users
shouldn't be building bespoke kernels these days - what is the
alternative?

KDE depends on RPM ?!?!?!

What no Super Methane Brothers?

Well so far I'm quite impressed - despite the gripes, a nice
selection of software (although KOffice still has a long way to
go), Mozilla seems amazingly fast (but since I don't have a
network connection till the wireless is sorted.....).

Choice of "arcade" games, and having Debian everywhere in the
menu's is a tad disappointing, but then I only did the one CD
install.

dselect screen layout sucks - should I try aptitude or
a.n.other?

Simon

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