Installing Debian/Sarge on Laptop
My Kanotix/Knoppix-installation on my Sony-Laptop sucked. Hotplugging was quite crappy and using WLAN-card with WEP at IPICS04 did not work. So it was time for testing the Debian/Sarge-DVD I got by Fred Andresen from Linux-New-Media.
Installation of Debian/Sarge was quite comfortable. No (obvious) bugs in the installer, no loss of data and a fast way to get a current version of Debian/unstable. The takeover of my pptp- and wlan-setup was done quite fast. Sound is working and I’m running 2.6.8-rc2.
Notice: never try to start KDE when you don’t have a loopback-device. Not a single error-message, debugging due to the kdeinit-system is quite hard and you just notice a hanging ksplash at 25% – *doh*.
July 28th, 2004 at 21:26
KDE without lo device … yep, been there, done that…
One day, I crashed my Debian installation (well… I proably shouldn’t have fooled around with hdparm …) … and after a cold reboot, my KDE didn’t work … nor did any of the KDE apps (or only after a timeout had kicked in while they were trying to contact DCOP, and then only without components that they were trying to get from the KParts system)… the reason was that for some reason, my loopback device had disappeared for good… a fact that I only noticed a couple of months later (when jEdit, an editor, had started behaving oddly);
Anyway… something good came out of it: I dumped KDE and have been happily using IceWM ever since…. KDE just isn’t close when it comes to switching-between-desktops performance…
July 28th, 2004 at 21:56
What sucks is the IMO missing error-message. For “normal users” it’s absolutely impossible to find such an error.
But what I really like is kicker with it’s applets. And Alt+F2 is quite handy and much more powerful than:
#!/bin/sh
COMMAND=`kdialog –inputbox “run command:”`
$COMMAND || kdialog –msgbox “error: $COMMAND not found”
;-)
As a desktop-environment it is really great, suffering from strong hardware of course small window managers are much more useful – then I prefer ion and pekwm. But as you probably know everyone has his own requirements ;-)