[GRLUG] The battle of the distros

[Collin Kidder]

> I installed Debian on my laptop with the 3945 wireless card which works
> fine.   The kernel version in Debian 4.0r5 requires the ipw3945 driver,
> which is not part of the kernel (I think it was added around 2.6.24 or
> .25).  On install, it does some wonky things with the device name, but I
> was able to get it to work.  On Debian Lenny (5.0) the kernel has
> support for 3945 built in (plus the proprietary firmware) with iwl3945.
>
> I don't have an nVidia in it but X was easy to get working properly.  I
> bet with a little effort Debian could be made to work properly.  Oh, and
> installing Debian Etch (4.0r5) is kind of pointless now that Lenny is
> soon to release.
>
>   

I hadn't seen that 5.0 was coming out soon. Maybe I'll try that once 
it's released.  I know that you need the ipw3945 package for 4.0r5 and I 
did download that but it still didn't want to work. Even when I manually 
loaded the driver it wouldn't properly initialize the card. Admittedly I 
didn't try that hard. Plugging into a wired router worked fine.

As for the nvidia driver, I did try hard there. For some reason it just 
did not want to see my LCD display on my laptop. It wasn't the nvidia 
drivers though. The vesa driver would not work either. There was 
something with the way Debian was setting up X that just killed the 
display. It seemed, from the X log, that the problem was with DDC 
probing to find the monitor. All three other distros could probably use 
DDC and I2C and find the LCD but no matter what I did Debian would not. 
I have no idea why and frankly don't care anymore. One surefire way to 
make someone never want to use your distro is to break the display chain 
so that they can't use X at all. I tried finding some help on their 
forums and wiki and it seems like nobody else had that problem. So maybe 
it's just that my Toshiba x205 is weird in some way. Still, three out of 
four distros worked flawlessly.