[TriLUG] Debian on Dell

[Timothy A. Chagnon]

On Sat, 2004-03-06 at 17:27, 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.

DVD Burners work fine if you use the right tools.  The dvd+rw-tools
package contains the things you need to burn DVDs.  Most of the GUI
burning programs don't have support for it yet, but if you don't mind
using the CLI, it works great.  Regular CD-R/RWs can be burned with the
normal tools or GUIs.

> 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
> 
> "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.

The nvidia installer does contain source code so when you install a new
kernel you can rebuild the module for it.  The source is all copyright
NVidia though, and the installer is an all inclusive shell script which
is probably why it's referred to as binary a lot.

-Tim
-- 
Timothy A. Chagnon <tchagnon at nc.rr.com>
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