[Sussex] Debian and the nvidia driver!

[Steven Dobson]

John

On Sun, 2006-08-20 at 17:51 +0100, John D. wrote:
> > > 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.
> 
> Well, I managed to get shot of the US english bit straight away, so "it" was 
> fine under GUI, it still wasn't "playing" in CLI - I'm not sure if I've cured 
> that yet either - Ha! it's not often that I find use for things like | and ^

AS I live in the CLI "|" is one of the most widely used keys, and as I
do a lot of grep(1)ing "^" get is fair share of use too.

Try doing a:
   # dpkg-reconfigure locales

On my system I only use one locale "en_GB.ISO-8859-1" and my default is
"none" - this might work for you.

You might also want to see what locale(1) reports:

  $ locale
  LANG=
  LANGUAGE=en_GB:en_US:en_GB:en
  LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
  LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
  LC_TIME="POSIX"
  LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
  LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
  LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
  LC_PAPER="POSIX"
  LC_NAME="POSIX"
  LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
  LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
  LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
  LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
  LC_ALL=

Also look at the /etc/environment file.  My knowledge on the locale
settings in Debian is a bit weak because I answered the questions
correctly at install time and have never had to bother with them since.
If you just hit return when you were asked about locale then in all
likely hood you got a US configuration.

<snip>

> Perhaps it's about time, that I made a boot floppy for this, and then sorted 
> myself some additional hard drive space and installed gentoo there - that way 
> I'd not find myself without a working system.

My advice is not to bother with boot floppies.  If your system is
configured to only run Linuxes (which it sounds like it now is) then
grub or lilo will handle booting to any of your installed distros.  I
would buy a second disk too I got a 200GB disk not longer for less than
£50.  With that much space you could even have one distro installed
twice.  One which is stable and one in which you play with the
configuration until to get it right.  

Steve