[TriLUG] Debian on Dell

[crimsun at fungus.sh.nu]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 06:28:03PM -0500, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> Can you tell me the make of the drive? Also, does regular SCSI
> emulation (for 2.4.x) still get the hardware support for burning
> working, or do I have to do more?

From /var/log/dmesg:
...
hdc: HL-DT-STDVD-ROM GDR8162B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
...

You do not need to use scsi-emulation (CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDESCSI in 2.6).
Instead, use cdrecord v2's ATAPI transport with kernel 2.6's device
spec:

# cdrecord -v dev=/dev/hdc foo.iso    (from the above drive)

This means also that you can remove the append="hdc=ide-scsi" from your
bootloader's conffile.

> So it is possible they might be using some other ethernet card? And could
> there be problems in that case? Sigh...

It's possible. Make sure you get the e1000.

> I'm still trying to use 2.6.x (2.6.2) on my home machine. I've been
> having annoying problems with my mouse pointer being too jumpy. I
> thought that passing the psmouse.proto=bare option to the kernel
> should fix it, but it doesn't seem to.

Shouldn't occur with these Dells and their USB mice.

> Oh, so the Geforce4 and the Quadro both work with X 4.3? I can get it from
> unstable (I'm running sarge).

For "nv", yes. As you've experienced, "nvidia" is version-agnostic.

> I've had lots of trouble with ALSA, at least on 2.4.x, which I am still
> using. I did get a similar integrated sound chipset (Intel8x0) working on
> both an IBM machine and on a Dell Optiplex, though I had to switch off
> KDE's arts daemon, which was interfering with it. I just figure the Audigy
> would work more nicely.

Intel8x0s do not support hardware multiopen. ALSA provides a software
multiopen mixer at the API level known as dmix (which you can combine
with dsnoop for dshare), so you can multiplex simultaneous sounds. This
of course requires most applications to be updated to support dmix, but
it does work fairly well on this Dell.

The Audigy uses an EMU10K1 variant, which does support hardware
multiopen, so dmix is not necessary (though I do use it at home for my
sblive).

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