a few debian questions

[Ameer Armaly]

In answer to your first question, I would seriously recomend building a
custom kernel; if you want, you can build it into a deb package with the
"kernel-package" deb.    You can just use the stuff from
linux-speakup.org;it's universal as far as I know.  As to newer distros, you
can replace "stable" in your /etc/apt/sources.list with "testing" or
"unstable", depending on what you want; unstable is always newer than
testing, but buggier too.  As far as net goes, you can build a new kernel
and use it to debootstrap a system; I know that if you install pump, it'll
automatically dhcp your system at startup for you.



Ameer
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gregory Nowak" <greg at romuald.net.eu.org>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Saturday, November 01, 2003 8:42 PM
Subject: a few debian questions


> 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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