[plug] Newbys guide

[Cameron Patrick]

Kev wrote:

> I have Debian Sarge in at the mo, but it won't recognize my sound card 
> or my video card properly.  Sound ->  CMedia 8738 6 channel LX
>                             Video ->  Nvidia Riva TNT2 32meg.
> The OS/2 driver I use for sound is in fact a port of ALSA and is 
> arguably the best sound card for OS/2.  All of the card's capabilities 
> are supported.  Sarge will only allow me max of 800 x 600 @ 64K colours 
> video.

I'm surprised that the sound wasn't picked up automatically.  My
experience with Nvidia graphics cards under Linux has always been that
they're a pain to configure and a good way to have a crashy unstable
system.  There's no reason why this should be the case and other
people seem to be able to get them going, so maybe I've just been
lucky.

> I mainly want to record music from records and other external
> sources to create CDs

At one point I used a shareware Windows programme running under WINE
in Linux to do this.  There's also gramofile (included in Debian)
which does declicking of music from records and audacity (also in
Debian) which is supposed to be a good audio editor but has a pretty
unintuitive interface.

> Oh, the other thing I want is HPFS file system compatability, because I 
> have so much stuff on HPFS drives, and I have no intention of scrapping 
> my OS/2 until I'm comfortable with Linux.  This of course is where 
> "re-compile your kernel" is required, at which point I quit.

Should be possible without recompiling kernels (something which I
dread doing, despite having used Linux for quite a while).  The stock
Debian kernels have HPFS support, but it isn't loaded by default.  You
need to put a line saying
    hpfs
in /etc/modules to enable it; and then edit /etc/fstab appropriately
if you want hpfs partitions mounted automatically.  (Disclaimer: I
don't actually used HPFS myself so can't guarantee that it works but
this procedure has worked for me with other filesystems.)

> Have a look into installable file systems as implemented in OS/2 for a 
> glaring example.

Linux has filesystems available as loadable modules already.
Unfortunately Linus doesn't believe in binary compatibility between
kernel versions (or even between two different people compiling the
same kernel version with different options) so "recompile the kernel"
is often the only reliable way of adding kernel-level functionality.
*sigh*

> Well, another thing which should be there is the ability to un-install 
> applications just as easilly as installing them.

Agreed.  The problem is that a lot of free software authors seem to
think that making installation and removal easy is the job of
distributors (such as Debian, Red Hat, and so on).  It's a tricky
problem in itself; this e-mail is already quite long enough without me
going into it and there was an, er, lively discussion on this list
about the matter when it was raised in 2003.

Cameron.