[wplug] Debian install Probs....

[mdanish at andrew.cmu.edu]

On Wed, Oct 31, 2001 at 07:35:44PM -0500, William Powell wrote:
> Have recently installed Debian 2.2r3.  Several Problems:
> 
> Install didn't pick up my network card or sound card.  Is there a
> utility that will pick these up in debian?
When you configure Modules and drivers, you are asked to select the appropriate
modules from a given list of available modules.

> 
> I added the network card info to conf.modules, and it recognized it, but
> did some major whining on bootup about the use of modules.conf (which
> shouldn't be edited by hand)
And why did you not respect the warnings?  Debian developers try very
hard to not get in the way of system administrators, but when configuration
files must be automatically updated then a place is usually set aside for
local sysadmin changes.  In this case the place is /etc/modutils/aliases
and you should run 'update-modules' once you have editted that.  Do not
edit /etc/modules.conf directly.

If you had bothered to read the warning you would have gleaned this
information.

You can also re-run the modules configuration utility that you should have
seen at install-time by running the command 'modconf' as root.  It will
add entries to the file /etc/modules, naming each module to be loaded
at boot; one per line.

> 
> I ran linuxconf and entered all of the IP, gateway, and DNS stuff, but
> the default route doesn't show up in the routing table unless I manually
> enter it with the route command. What file can I enter the route info
> manually?
Linuxconf is evil... :)

Get rid of it, I cannot even begin to imagine what nasty stuff it might be
doing to your configuration.

Edit the file /etc/network/interfaces to use the default 'ifupdown'
network configuration.  See the manual page for 'interfaces' for the
syntax of this file, but it is fairly simple:

iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet static
	address ip.ad.dr.ess
	netmask ne.tm.as.k
	gateway ga.te.wa.y

auto lo eth0 # bring it up on boot (or 'ifup -a')

-
The lo interface may already be present.
See the man page for 'ifup' and 'ifdown' once you've done this...

> 
> I have tried to RTFDM (looked for Debian Docs) that cover this stuff,
> but it has eluded me so far.
You haven't looked very hard.  Every package comes with documentation in
/usr/share/doc/<package-name>/ and every executable program is required
to have an associated manual-page (perhaps you didn't install 'man-db'
package?)  http://www.debian.org/doc/ contains many guides.
http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/ is an effort to collect even more
resources for Debian newbies.  And you may want to consult my reference
for APT and dpkg at http://people.debian.org/~mrd/apt-dpkg-ref/ so that
you learn to work with the package system instead of against it.
And there is a fairly decent guide to compiling a Linux Kernel the
"Debian way" (which is much nicer than the usual method), which you
should read about on Newbiedoc before recompiling the kernel.  This
especially should be used if you plan to use ALSA and the alsa-source
package for your sound card.

-- 
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;; Matthew Danish                         email: mdanish at andrew.cmu.edu ;;
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