[plug] Newbys guide

[Craig Ringer]

On Sun, 2005-01-30 at 17:43 +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> 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 haven't had any issues for a *long* time, and I actually use the not-
really-supported RENDER acceleration.

> > 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.

To be honest, I've always found the easiest way to do this was just to
use `cdrecord'.

$ cdrecord dev=n,n,n -audio track1.wav track2.wav track3.wav ...

where dev= is found with cdrecord -scanbus. It "just works" with none of
the painful stuffing about I've usually found is necessary in GUI CD
burning utilities.

> > 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.

For now, the best options are:
	- Use your distributor's packages
	- Use 3rd party packages for your distro
	- If you have to compile it, use --prefix to drop it in a
          separate directory like /usr/local/appname . That way you
          can just delete the directory when you want to get rid of it.
        - Use something like checkinstall to automatically make packages
          from custom-built software. I haven't used this myself.

I do agree that it'd be nice if it was easier to install and remove
apps, but I guess it doesn't bother me much personally. If there was a
bit more compatibility between distros, it'd just be a matter of making
packages and the problem's gone - but right now you have to make
packages for half a million different distros and versions, so it's just
too painful for the original software developer to do.

That said, some software is also available as SRPMs that'll build on
almost all systems (the Cyrus IMAPd RPMs are a good example of this).
That seems like a relatively sane approach.

If you use your distro's package management system, removing apps should
be a non-issue.

-- 
Craig Ringer