Journal rdewald's Journal: Notes: Debian / IBM Thinkpad T22 Re-build 3

Newsflash: Plain vanilla Debian Linux (as opposed to *Ubuntu, Gentoo, Damn Small Linux and all the other Debian variants) is not ready for the desktop. Film at 11.

"Everyone's got one" Dept: I don't care.

As has always been the case with my Linux installs, after I got about one week into this one I reinstalled everything. I wanted to partition /home from the rest of the directory tree. I wanted to start with a 2.6 kernel rather than trying to upgrade one in the sarge stable universe. I wanted to make a clean Sun JVM install (I know, I tainted my machine) because I do use OpenOffice (and a backport build) a lot. I added some stuff to KDE I wanted to get rid of. I wanted to switch to Lilo for a bootloader.

It went well, I used the "expert26" option in the installer. I still need to custom compile a kernel, this thing is seriously bloated, but at least it will be a minor 2.6 upgrade and not the jump from the 2.4 kernel when I do. Fellow Debianites (hand over heart), I tried to do a kernel upgrade "The Debian Way" using kernel-package and all that. It ain't ready for the desktop. It ain't ready for the circular file under the desk. Its still all broken, obviously real kernel hackers are compiling the classic way, no one would put up with all this dependency chaos.

But 2.6.8 ships with the net-install iso and that's not bad. It's a huge momma, full of crap I don't need, with dozen of modules I'll never call, but it works.

I also tainted my kernel with the madwifi module because the CompUSA one floor below my office had the ZyXEL G102v2 on sale for $19.99. Note: use the module-assistant method for the compile and install. The card works fine and kwifimanager does a good job of wrapping around for the user environment. NB: the interface is athn.

I think this will be the build that sticks. I'll hack this kernel down to what I need and then this baby will be ready for production use. Nice to get a free computer every once in a while....