Installation history

On 7 December 2002, I purchased a vpr matrix 200a5 from BestBuy on Pico and Sawtelle.

12 August 2005: Xorg

An update showed that x-windows had been upgraded from 4.3.0 to 6.8.2, which is to say Debian sid has made the transition from XFree86 to Xorg! I upgraded all packages, seeing that they had likely been in experimental for several months already, and I have great confidence in Brandon Robinson's X-Strike Force! The installation went without a hitch and so did the first startup -- I'm writing in the new xorg now, without making any configuration changes, other than renaming the old x-windows configuration file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. A very smooth upgrade. I changed the keyboard driver from the legacy "keyboard" to the new "kbd".

11 August 2005: hotplug

I've not been using hotplug because it loads lots of stuff I don't want loaded. However, it's also useful -- I'd like the external drive or flash sticks to get loaded and perhaps even mounted automatically, and the touchpad to get inactivated when I plug in an external mouse, but otherwise stay active -- there may be other things, say loading the drivers for playing a DVD. So I'm now adding modules I don't want loaded to the list in /etc/hotplug/blacklist and trying out hotplug.

I'm adding these to the blacklist -- ali-agp slamr parport_pc parport pcspkr -- the parport I never use, the pcspeaker I don't want, the modem I want to load manually, and ali-agp won't unload once it's loaded (this may not matter -- I think it suspends fine, and it may do some useful work, even with the nv driver).

You can then run the 'cool' script to unload modules you don't need right away; hotplug should then add them in as needed. Because you don't need to re

23 May 2004: initrd

I copied some module names over from /etc/modules to /etc/mkinitrd/modules and issued

mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd-2.6.5.img

I added this line to /etc/lilo.conf, under the image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.5 heading:

initrd = /boot/initrd-2.6.5.img

18 April 2004 update

Locating libraries

The prelink program will make ELF applications start faster, by figuring out library locations beforehand. Issue

prelink --all

/usr/X11R6/lib
/usr/lib/i3d/
/usr/lib/openoffice/program/

10 December 2002 narrative

Partitioning

I used PartitionMagic to shrink the NTFS partition from 40GB to 5GB and then booted Libranet. I created some new logical partitions for /, swap, and /boot, and left the rest alone, as Libranet can't create FAT32 partitions and I thought one of those might be useful. The CD drive then had some trouble reading the Libranet CDs -- I had to reboot once and reinitialize the partitions, and even on that second try it failed at once point to read the CD. Still, it read enough to let me boot, and I then used the adminmenu to install everything that had been missed -- this time with no mishaps.

Applications

I got a slew of my favorite applications from marillat's unofficial debs site, pine and pico from an unofficial site, and the latest mozilla. It's a blast to see everything working so well! I'm actually typing this in Dreamweaver, which is running remotely on my desktop under vmware -- very cool. I also got ieee1394 tools and defined the device nodes.

Note that you shouuld make a backup of this configuration before you run xf86config -- and see the instructions at http://www.indianest.com/computing/linux/011.htm.

The built-in mouse has been ignored and was initally not working; solution below. 

I also did a quick "mount steen2:/mnt/vc vc" -- and it just worked on the first attempt! There's nothing in fstab, but hosts was copied over from spello. So that's about it -- the screen, remote X-windows (and Win98), mounting, sound -- just the built-in mouse left. Time to go home. Pretty spectacular, actually -- and great for teaching!

Customizing

In general, I followed the instructions in the Debian installation, copying over ~/.bashrc, /home/steen/.mods, /home/steen/.addressbook, and /home/steen/.opera/opera.adr. I also wholesale copied over the /home/steen/Desktop, with the icon definitions, and a couple of missing icons. This is a very fast way of getting set up!