Hah. After many interruptions, side-excursions, problems, and inconveniences, I finally have my Debian install up and running happily again.
Ah, the hardships of living on the (almost) bleeding edge of technology...
It all started when I put a new motherboard in my computer. This, as already noted, completely trashed my XP install. I'm not crying too hard, as it's past time for me to investigate Wine again anyway. Anyway, the NForce chipset required new driver downloads. I never did get the onboard ethernet driver working, but I'll fix that later.
Then my new laptop got here, and I was forced to get Linux installed on it, and play with it for awhile.
I got the NForce sound drivers installed on my desktop, and everything was running great...
*one apt-get dist-upgrade later*
Whoops. Then I had GCC 4.0, a kernel compiled with GCC 3.3.6, a new version of glibc, and currently broken NVidia drivers. This was most discouraging, so I left it alone for a little while.
I later came back, determined to recompile the kernel with GCC 4, and then everything would work, right?
Hah.
There's actually a good reason GCC 4 is only in the unstable tree right now. One kernel patch, a manual edit of i2c code, and several loooooong compiles of the kernel later, I had a working version of 2.6.11.
Incidentally, Debian's method of compiling kernel source into a couple of .deb files works pretty well. Once you remember to add the options for the initrd file. You know, the file that's absolutely necessary to boot properly.
Then I downloaded new NVidia graphics and NForce drivers, compiled them successfully, and started X. Only to find out that the PS/2 mouse driver has been drastically changed since kernel 2.4.
Yes. And the default protocol hates my mouse. However, the imps protocol does not, as I found out after an hour of sifting through Google searches.
Now, all I have to do is fix the DSL modem's weird DNS settings that break my IM connections whenever the computer renews its IP address.
Posted by Ardith at September 17, 2005 04:43 PM | TrackBack