[svlug] the continuing saga of the supercheap eMachines box;-)

[Alex Martelli]

On Jul 16, 2006, at 11:00 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
    ...
> 1.  Congratulations.  ;->

Thanks!

> 2.  Even though I'm a long-time Debian sysadmin, I tend to  
> disrecommend
> Debian to people until they're relatively experienced with a couple of
> other Linux distributions.

Well, my experience _installing_ distros is limited and dated -- back  
when I first got involved with Linux there was no such thing as a  
"distribution", and in the last few years I've switched to Mac for my  
personal use (basically for the same reasons my now-colleague, then- 
Redhat-employee Chip Turner mentions at his blog <http://other- 
eighty.blogspot.com/2005_12_01_other-eighty_archive.html> ) -- even  
though my income for the last several years has come mostly from  
developing in and for Linux, I'm invariably using and programming for  
machines which others have installed and tuned.  But while the Debian  
installation experience on this box hasn't been flawless, it's still  
been vastly more satisfatory than the alternatives I've tried,  
particularly Ubuntu (a bit surprising and disappointing, given than I  
consider Mark Shuttleworth as a friend:-).  And I doubt gentoo is the  
distro you steer newbies too, hm?-)  [[Haven't tried gentoo --  
perhaps I should add a "yet", or perhaps I shouldn't:-)]]


>> The one  bit in the BIOS settings that apparently had to remain
>> disabled was  the on-chip USB controller -- when enabled, it causes
>> Debian's boot  to just hang forever in the "detecting hardware" phase
>> -- but every  other aspect that we had at first disabled (APIC, ACPI,
>> PnP OS, etc,  etc) we could re-enable without problems.
>
> Hmm, that's a new one.  (I believe you, of course.)  Sometimes, using
> the installer's alternate 2.6-kernel boot option at the "boot:" prompt
> will get around such problems.  The non-obviousness of that alternate
> installer kernel typifies the numerous reasons I steer a lot of people
> away from the Debian installer.

Interesting!  Considering that everything IS installed now, what boot  
parameter should I pass the kernel to see if this "alternative"  
works?  I don't really need to use USB kb/mouse right now, but it  
would be a nice option in the future, particularly if I want to put  
the box behind a KVM switch with some Macs (all USB-only of course).

>
>> And the one bit of manual  configuration that proved necessary was in
>> xorg.conf: had to add  "HorizSync 30-82" to the "Monitor" section,
>> otherwise X11, apparently  not autodetecting the AL1703's correct
>> range of hsync, would be stuck  on 640x480.
>
> Yeah, that happens, sometimes.  I'm guessing that the installer just
> couldn't deal with the EDID information from your monitor, for some
> reason.

Apparently, yes, even though some other distros made it, Ubuntu and  
Debian didn't - ah well, an easy-ish fix.

>
>> Basically, I'm at the stage where the worst open issue is, how do I
>> get the box to fully participate like all others in my macs-filled
>> house's zeroconf/rendezvous/bonjour arrangements -- right now the box
>> "knows" it's called box.local (it can ping itself by that name;-) but
>> can't solve the xxx.local names of other machines on the LAN, and
>> other machines don't see it properly (by name, i.e., as box.local)
>> either.  But, I can deal with having to call it 10.0.1.54 for a
>> while, while I research the issues at leisure (yes, I do have avahi-*
>> on the box already:-).
>
> So, I have a page of starting points for you, which is sort of half a
> loaf because it would be really nice if I could give you some tested
> recipes, instead.  Here: "ZeroConf" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/ 
> Hardware/

Thanks, but there are no occurrences of "zeroconf" on that page.   
Perhaps you mean:
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Network_Other/zeroconf.html ?

> And kudos for persevering and prevailing thus far!

Heh, thanks!-)


Alex