[GRLUG] The battle of the distros

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 01:36:38PM -0500, Collin Kidder wrote:
> 
> > 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.

"Soon" in the Debian world could be months away.  I suspect it will be
released in the next couple months or so.  The Debian release team is
working to determine which bugs (bugs have a very different meaning in
Debian; a bug could simply be something that doesn't quite match up to
Debian policy and not be a problem in the software) are truly
release-critical.

To use ipw3945 you need to start /etc/init.d/ipw3945d (I think that's
what its called).  I *definitely* recommend trying Lenny.  I am running
it currently (as Debian Testing).

> 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.

I can say one think with great confidence.  If Debian *Stable* didn't
work on your laptop the problem is in some quirky freak of
hardware—especially if you are using a fifth release of Debian Stable
(4.0r5).  Wacky.  When I installed Debian on my laptop (last March-ish)
I believe I started with Debian Etch and then upgraded to Testing/Lenny.
I had no problem getting it to recognize my Intel video card.

If the laptop is fairly recent it could be a problem with Etch's xorg
(its a couple years old).
-- 
john-thomas
------
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only
exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess
from the public treasury.
Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813)