[sclug] Nice board to use with Linux

[Philip Hands]

At Tue, 28 Jan 2003 20:36:57 -0000,
Pieter Claassen wrote:
> 
> I have eventually managed to get a stable and nice platform working and
> thought I would let you all know in case you are looking for a system
> like this.
> 
> The board  is an Elite L4S5MG/GL with a SiS 650 north bridge chip. The
> network card goes with the sis900 driver and the sound card goes with
> the i810 driver (don't expect too much).

Does the sis900 NIC actually work OK?  I've had a few of those on
Jetway boards that can be provoked into some very odd behaviour by
pulling the cable out, and plugging it back in, while they're in use
--- they seem to lose track of the interrupts somehow, and start
delaying packets up to 5 seconds every ten seconds or so.

[...]
> The idea is to offer support for both corporates and individuals on this
> product range (linux support!). The openauth website has some articles
> on TCO improvements in moving to linux and outsourcing the support of
> the systems.
> 
> We are hiring people so if you know of any technical support people
> interested, please let me know.

I'm not interested in a job, but if you're ever in need of someone to
re-outsource some of your support issues to, feel free to get in touch
:-) Oh, and in case you are interested, I can get a several of the
other Debian Developers in on the act if required, so if it's not in
my area of expertise, it's probably covered by one of the rest of us.

> 2. The current build is from the unstable tree. This might be a little
> bid edgy. If I want to move the build back to lets say "testing", can I
> do this with dselect (without it de- and reinstalling my whole binary
> tree)?

Should be fine.  If what you really want to do is run a mostly
stable machine, with a smattering of testing and unstable, you should
list all three in your /etc/apt/sources.list:

  deb http://www.uk.debian.org/debian stable main contrib
  deb http://www.uk.debian.org/debian testing main contrib
  deb http://www.uk.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib

and then tell apt that you prefer stable in /etc/apt/apt.conf:

  APT::Default-Release "stable";
  APT::Cache-Limit "10240000" ;

(the Cache-Limit line is only needed if, like me, you find that all
the extra sources make "apt-get update" bail out with out of memory
errors)

Once you've done that, apt-get will try to get stuff from stable
unless you tell it otherwise, thus:

  apt-get install kdebase/testing

or whatever.  You then generally get some complaints about the fact
that various libraries and dependent packages are going to be the
wrong version, so just cut & paste them onto the apt-get line
appending /testing or /unstable as needed (or possibly /stable if you
want to force some library back to that, and the versions don't
conflict).  Eventually you'll get to a command line that doesn't
provoke apt-get to whine about versions, and you can go for it.

Obviously, if you want mostly testing, then just put testing in the
apt.conf setting.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
Say no to software patents!  http://petition.eurolinux.org/

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