[Sussex] Debian and the nvidia driver!

[Steven Dobson]

John

On Sun, 2006-08-20 at 16:36 +0100, John D. wrote:
> Believe it or not, I've solved this - but in a rather unexpected way.

Congratulations.

> I've been thinking (apparently) along debian lines - making the mistake of 
> confusing debian and kanotix.

Well you know me to be a Debian only guy and you told me that Kanotix is
based on Debian sid.  My AMD64 machine is a Debian Sid system so I
assumed that I might be able to help some.

> I'm presuming that Kano has done something with his kernel versions, because 
> during my digging around, I found this :- 
> http://www.kanotix.de/FAQ-id_cat-15.html#q109
> 
> So, I thought, after checking out the kanotix page/website, I noticed that his 
> kernel version number is even higher than the one that I was trying to manage 
> courtesy of synaptic/debian mirrors and decided that I couldn't make any more 
> of a "pigs ear" of this than I already have.
> 
> Suffice to say that I'm now running this:-
> 
> john at johnspc:~$ uname -r
> 2.6.17.9-slh-up-1
> john at johnspc:~$

In an earlier e-mail the same command returned what looked like a
standard Debain kernel.

> > john at johnspc:~$ uname -r
> > 2.6.17-2-686
> > john at johnspc

> with a working nvidia driver :-D)))))))))

Even better.

> Now all I have to do, is reset all my desktop icons etc that I had to change 
> to make the system even moderately readable, plus try to work out, why, when 
> I booted into the new kernel version that I had to play "hunt the key" - 
> which I'm presuming is to do with Kano being German and having a different 
> Xkb setting (it was the | symbol that I couldn't find - it was at shft ~).

That sounds like the same Knoppix assumption that if you speak English
you must be an American with an American keyboard.  Have a look at your
keyboard localisation settings - in Knoppix there is a icon in the
bottom right hand corner that show it an allows you to change it too.

> Should I just stick with this and learn the kanotix way of doing stuff or look 
> into making it properly "debianised" ? I don't know.
> 
> With your assistance and eventually finding some instructions that work, it's 
> been one hell of a learning curve (again) :-P but I suppose, like British 
> Rail, I'll get there, eventually.

As a "nugget" one advantage of running one of the more popular distro
would be that help would be easier to come by.  There are a number of
people who, like me, use Debian.  Colin is about to become a DD so the
amount of Debian knowledge is pretty good.  For Fedora we have Joh, who
as a Redhat employee can teach you the one true way of doing all things
Fedora.

It is my impression, maybe mistakenly, that you tend to jump distros as
soon as on becomes "to difficult" to do what you're trying to do.  I
don't like jumping distos becuase you also "throw away the baby with the
bathwater."  Each time to have to remaster skills that you had already
mastered on your old distro.  [Yes, I know that most of the skills
needed to run one Linux distro are the same, but there are differences
and those differences are important too.]

In over twenty-five years in IT I concider that I only really became an
expert in: Pet (1st computer), VMS (as a user at Uni, but a power user),
SunOS (first job as a developer), AmigaOS (2nd computer),  Solaris
(developer and I ran it at home) & Debian (all I now run).  So my advice
is going to be pick a distro you like and stick with it.  So, think back
over all the distros you've tried and which one worked best for you?
Which one had the best support?

Steve