[Cialug] Debian newbie questions

[Renegade Muskrat]

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately, i had already figured out most 
of this stuff by the time the response came though.

Too bad the CIALUG server died. Thank you to those who fixed it!

 > dpkg is the package manager (like RPM).
 > Apt is sort of a front end (extension) to the package manager, which
 > adds additions functions (Like Up2date?). Aptitude in a more 
friendly
 > console interface to apt. Check out (# apt-get install synaptic)
 > Synaptic a GTK interface. dselect is an other older on that is being
 > phased out and difficult to get used to. I would avoid this one 
unless
 > there is reason not to. Check out the man pages ;).

Ok, that makes sense. I've had to use dpkg a few times, such as to get 
a list of all the installed packages.

I think dselect was the main reason people (myself included) used to 
complain bitterly about Debian's installer and never really gave it a 
fair chance. The installation now is fairly simple, and to figure out 
aptitude only took me minute or two.

 > Debian is still not great at sound. Ubuntu works much better here. #
 > modeprobe emu8k
 > I think should work.
 > If it does do # echo emu8k >> /etc/modules
 > Send your lsmod output please if is doesn't.
 > And what kernel did you use? Are you usings ALSA or OSS?

I figured out sound. I'm using kernel 2.4.27, with Alsa. I discovered 
the alsaconf program, but it always gave errors. I eventually 
determined that there is a package called "alsa-modules" that is 
required for alsaconf to work. Unfortunately, in Sarge there is no 
alsa-modules for kernel 2.4.27. I tried forcing an install of the 
alsa-modules for kernel 2.4.26, but they didn't seem to work. Later i 
figured out how to install the alsa-modules package from Sid. Upon 
doing that, alsaconf magically started working, and now sound works 
just fine, even after rebooting. I've tried playing sound through both 
Alsa and OSS, and both seem to be working.

Before getting Alsa to work, i determined that modprobe'ing each of 
these modules made OSS sound work: sb, opl3, awe_wave. I haven't tried 
having them loaded while Alsa is configured, and probably won't try it 
since everything seems to be working now.

 > No. You could make a simple bash script to do this if you wanted. 
But,
 > just do /etc/init.d/<script> <action>.

Ok. I just wanted to know the canonical Debian way of starting and 
stopping services. I got used to the Red Hat "services" command, but 
can certainly live without it well enough that i probably won't even 
bother with the 1 or 2 line shell script to replace it.

 > If wish to always use the testing branch make sure your sources.list
 > has the "testing" reference in it.

Yep, sources.list contains "testing" but no specific reference to 
Sarge. So looks like i'll stay with testing, which is what i want.

So far i like Debian. Despite requiring more manual configuration than 
recent versions of Red Hat or Mandrake (both of which i'm more familiar 
with), a lot more things "just work" than they did in Red Hat 6.2, 
which was what the machine had on it previously.

Now that i'm getting close to having everything set up the way i want 
with Debian, i probably won't switch to Ubuntu. The machine in question 
is my main Linux box at home. I prefer above all else for it to have a 
stable configuration; it had been about 3 years since i last did any 
serious updates. One of the main reasons i went with Debian was because 
i'd heard it is easy to stay current with software updates. So far, 
aptitude seems to make it very easy indeed. With Red Hat i just didn't 
bother. But i'll keep Ubuntu in mind as something to play with on 
another machine. My manager at work has asked me to set up a Linux box 
as a demonstration of what it can do compared to Windows; perhaps i'll 
use that opportunity to try out Ubuntu.
                                                -- Dan
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       Daniel Ramaley                  3118 Cottage Grove Ave Apt 8
       dramaley at spatulacity dot cx        Des Moines, Iowa 50311
       http://www.spatulacity.cx/                    (515) 271-5233
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