[TriLUG] Debian on Dell

[crimsun at fungus.sh.nu]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 05:27:24PM -0500, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> 1) One thing I am wondering about is the "8X DVD+RW/+R, Data Only". I have
> no experience with something like this in Linux. Can one burn and play
> DVDs.  CD-R/CD-RW's with this thing under Linux? I was wondering if it
> would be better to get separate DVD (read-only drive) and CD-RW drives to
> be on the safe side.

You can burn/play both DVDs, DVD+R(W)s, CDs, CD-R(W)s under Linux with
that drive. It really doesn't matter if you have two separate drives;
you'd just be wasting space in the case.

> 2) They are also being rather coy about the ethernet card. I assume
> (educated guess based on Daniel Chen's earlier message and other info)
> that there is an onboard Intel card (which works with the e1000 driver),

Make sure you press them regarding the e1000s. And if you use a 2.6
kernel (recommended), use at least 2.6.4-rc1.

> 3) I managed to get the Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440 card on a Dell Optiplex
> GX270 to work under X. I could not manage to work it with the nv X driver
> (as of 4.2 in testing) but the proprietary nvidia driver (ndvidia) worked.
> I hope it will be the same with this "nVidia, Quadro NVS 280". Daniel
> Chen's earlier Trilug message seems to confirm this.

'nv' in 4.2 does not support the GF4-family of pci ids. You'll need 4.3;
Norbert provides backports for Woody from Sid for binary-i386 here:

http://people.debian.org/~nobse/xfree86/

> A question: I have heard that the nvidia kernel modules are binary. How
> come they seem to work with pretty much any kernel I try? Usually binary
> kernel modules (in my experience) are very sensitive to the version of the
> kernel being compiled against). At any rate, it seems part of the kernel
> driver is actually being compiled. The documentation says

You probably mean "binary-only" in place of "binary" -- Nvidia cannot
provide open-source drivers (note ATI has also adopted this strategy for
their fgl drivers), but they do provide a "glue" layer (which you
compile per-kernel) between the binary interface (which you don't
compile).

> "Since the Linux kernel does not support a binary driver interface, we
> provide for rebuilding these files on the target machine (or distribution)
> and then linking with the binary version of the NV kernel driver."
> 
> but I'm not sure what this means.

See above statement regarding the "glue" layer.

> A friend of mine said the SCSI controller on Precisions was Adaptec but
> Daniel said it was LSI, which is presumably well supported by the
> mptfusion kernel modules. I'd prefer Adaptec, though.

_This_ particular set of computers that Intel funded has LSI, which uses
the mptfusion driver. Both work.

> 5) I'd welcome suggestions on changes in the configuration below to reduce
> cost while impacting functionality as little as possible.
[...]
>  Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy II with onboard 1394
   ^^^^^^ Kill this option. For workstations, just use the built-in
   sound chipset (Intel8x0), which works just fine with ALSA.

   Make sure you use the latest version of ALSA, 1.0.3.

>  Speakers:  Dell Two Piece Stereo System
   ^^^^^^^^^ Likewise, are these really necessary?

-- 
Daniel T. Chen          crimsun at fungus.sh.nu
GPG key:   www.sh.nu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc
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