[Preston] Bad Debian day

[Andrew King]

Matt Atkinson said (among other things):

>http://www.backports.org/
>  
>
Thanks for that!  That could be the last excuse I need for not bothering 
to try any other distro for the next five years or so :)

On another note, I'll probably not be at too many PLUG meetings any more 
- probably just a couple a year.  Computers have taken over work-wise 
now to the point where I just want to spend free time doing stuff other 
than computers.

Seems amazing too that after ditching Windows four years ago, I still 
have so many problems just with my own machines.  My Zaurus (one of them 
Linux PDAs - have been pretty happy with it) decided to randomly reset 
itself yesterday and lose all the data stored on it.  Then we had a 
power cut today.  When I realised two hours later and booted up the 
OpenBSD server, the fsck failed and insisted on being run manually.  So 
I ran the thing manually, and after eventually figuring out that 
answering yes to everything was the only way to get anywhere, it went 
and deleted a load of random stuff out of /usr/bin and /sbin.  Things 
that are kind of useful and important... like /sbin/init.  Great.  Even 
Windows 95 coped better with power cuts than this - I guess security 
really does come at a price!

Thanks for the encouragement with 2.6 - after just two hours or so total 
of messing about, I got the thing working with alsa.  Two things, actually:

(1) Does anyone know if it's possible to access usb-storage devices such 
as usb pen drives /without/ using SCSI emulation?
(2) Does anyone know offhand how to get modules (in particular, 
ne2k-pci, snd-ens1371 and snd-pcm-oss) for kernel 2.6 under Debian?
(3) This definitely is just a case of STFW, but any ideas how to set the 
defaults for alsamixer on bootup?  Whoever had the genius idea of making 
everything muted and at 0% volume as the default?  That makes about as 
much sense as shipping an o/s with lots of ports open and then telling 
people it has built-in security!

Andrew