Re: [LI] debian problems...

[Sudhakar Chandrasekharan <thaths@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

RAVIKANT K RAO proclaimed:
>   after a 2 hour installation of debian, i was wanting to edit
> /etc/lilo.conf and discovered that pico was non-existent (?!) ... Did I do
> something wrong during install time or does Debian not come default with
> Pico ?

pico comes with the pine package.  But because of UWash's stupid licensing
restriction Debian cannot distribute modified binaries of pine+pico. 
Debian therefore distributes pine+pico in source form.

If you don't want to go through the hassle of compiling pine+pico I'd
suggest that you follow the tip listed in
http://www.linuxmafia.com/debian/tips

<">
pico can be emulated by a symbolic link to the simple editor "ae", which 
is really very close to pico:

   cd /usr/local/bin
   ln -s ../../../bin/ae   pico
</">


> Also , Could anyone give me any pointers with using Debian ? For
> instance , in my RedHat , I used the Xconfigurator to configure my X and
> I could successfully probe my videocard and I had a lovely SVGA X Server
> running , while from Debian , the X-Probeonly doesnt achieve anything
> useful.

The Debian User's Guide package would be a nice place to start.  Download
http://ftp1.us.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/binary-i386/doc/debian-guide_1.0.0.deb
and install it using dpkg.  After that you could start reading it using
lynx or any other web browser by opening up the URL
file:///usr/doc/debian-guide/html/noframes/

>   Also, how do I configure my touchpad - on a laptop , compaq armada 1700
> - ... I remember it worked fine on redhat.. things like mouseconfig ,
> config , setup etc... one or more of which worked on my redhat box dont
> quite seem to work on debian...

I am assuming that your mouse is a ps/2 mouse.  Make sure that /dev/mouse
is a symbolic pointing to /dev/psaux.

Are you sure that psaux mouse support is turned on in the kernel?  'cat
/proc/misc' would list psaux if the kernel has the support compiled in.  If
psaux is not listed, then go into modconf and install the ps2 mouse
support.

>   Now this isnt to start weird distro wars ... but only 6 hours into
> Debian , i'm wondering if just 2 month's exposure to linux , primarily
> redhat ,....is enough to get working on a debian m/c...

Just hang in there.  In the beggining things would seem tough.  Debian is a
distribution that needs a little tweaking around to get things exactly the
way you want them to be.  I have found that this minimal hand holding is
very helpful in understanding how things work in the long run.

If you are planning on being in Linux for a while it is well worth the
effort to learn a unix-wide way of doing something instead of any
distribution-specific way of setting this or that thing up.

> Is
> there any Debian - Specific Textbook that I need to lookup to understand
> this distro or would any normal textbook on linux suffice...  ?

See note on debian-guide above.

Thaths
-- 
Lisa: Dad, what is a muppet?
Homer: Well, it's not quite a mop, it's not quite a puppet, but man!!!  So,
to answer your question, I don't know.
Sudhakar C13n http://people.netscape.com/thaths/ Lead Indentured Slave
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