a few debian questions

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi all.

Well, I got that 8gb drive working in my old box that had its previous
drive go bad.
It's become my spair "play" box, and is currently running debian. When
I get familiar enough with debian, I plan to play with redhat, and
maybe with freebsd if I can install and use that over ssh or telnet or
a serial console. That's all in the future though.

I do have a few debian questions. I will admit that I didn't bother
reading that long debian book on the debian site, and am just flying
with my experience with slackware and some debian hints I picked up
from this list here and there.
My questions are as follows.

1. I want to build my own kernel. Can I just grab the standard sources
from kernel.org, or do I need some dep package. If so, which one?

2. Somebody had said here that there was a speakup source package for
debian. If this is correct, and if I need to get a dep package from
question 1 above, then do I also need to get this speakup source
package, or can I just patch the kernel tree with the standard speakup
1.5 tarball? If I need to get this speakup source package, then again,
what package name am I looking for?

3. I installed using the woody floppies on linux-speakup.org, and the
internet for the rest. I understand that there are newer distros since
woody. Is there a way for me to upgrade my current install to the
newest stable distro? If so, then how?

4. Since the woody disks seemed to have no dhcp client, I had to
install the module for my network card, and to assign it a static
ip. These changes seemed to have carried over into the actual distro
install on the hd.
When I build my own kernel, I plan to build the network card support
right into the kernel, and to use dhcpcd. I don't have a problem with
looking around in /etc/init.d, and changing whatever I want
manually. However, coming from slackware, which doesn't have such a
strict package management system, I am afraid to do this, since I
might break something in the package management system somewhere.
How safe am I messing with things manually, and how do I know if/when
it's time for the system to take care of things? I'm not asking this
question in the way I'd like, but I'm hoping someone here who might
have moved from slackware to debian will understand what I'm trying to
ask.

I would very much appreciate any answers/advise.

Thanks in advance.

Greg


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