Jabbing my eyes out with a potato

This is my catharsis – after struggling with mighty Debian, I emerge victorious. Everybody else might be bored by it, but I feel better.

It all started when I had totally hosed my Linux setup on a home workstation. I tried to run the bleeding edge "unstable" distribution, and my networking became totally hosed. apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade did nothing for me, and after enough fighting, I let Sid (archived link, may no longer work, try this one) win and fully went over to the Dark Side.

So I existed with PuTTY (since I am a Unix admin after all and have to pay the ISP bills (archived link, may no longer work, try this one) somehow) for a while. But I finally had a free weekend and some time to spend, so I dug deep into the the Suitcase of Courage and went for it.

I started by booting from floppies (never a good idea) just to run the stable distribution (potato). An adventure in itself, I thought I'd be a smart volio and preserve my old /home partition.

Lesson #1: Always verify your assumptions.

Yes, you can see this coming, can't you? I was actually a dumb volio and blew away the wrong partition. But at the time, I didn't know this, and trundled happily along.

So since it's just a workstation, I didn't install too many extra tasks (mainly some development tasks), set it to install from the network (love that broadband!) and went in the living room to watch The Princess Bride and put together a small dining room table for Mrs. Volio (who isn't a volia anyway).

I returned to a happy little workstation (after plugging in some config parameters), or so I thought. BTW, at this point I realized my mistake with the /home partition and jabbed one of my eyes out.

Lesson #2: F'r Pete's sake, plan ahead!

Anyway, so now I need to update my packages (security updates and whatnot) as well as add anything else I like (such as everyone's favorite web browser and everyone's favorite GUI environment (archived link, may no longer work, try this one)). As I went to download packages, I realized my fatal error: I had made a typo or something when allocating space to my various partitions. Not enough space! I jabbed out another eye.

So I set this up to go again. Reboot from the floppies and reinstall. Yada yada yada get some sleep, eat what little nutrition I'm permitted (since the world doesn't need so much volio) and ran a few personal errands and took care of such business. Then Mrs. Volio decided to go pick up a cheesecake (she doesn't understand, does she? or maybe she does) and once again I delve into the wonders of Debian.

Next stop is hardware config. I don't have much on my circa-1998 machine, but I do want to get what I have working. This primarily includes a Voodoo3 2000 and a Logitech optical wheelmouse. Configuring X was a little messed up because I didn't do it right during the install, but it was OK because my friends at Debian were thoughtful enough to include a few packages for configuring it.

But there was some pain: I didn't have USB support. In fact, I had decided to install the idepci version of the kernel so that the modules weren't even available. So two choices were available: Try to get the 2.2.19 kernel with the USB backported code running, or just plug my mouse into a PS2 adapter. I am a dumb volio, as you may have noticed, so I tried to go the third route and install a 2.4.x kernel. I've done this before, I know what I'm doing... Yeah right!!

That went down in flames. System didn't want to boot. In fact, while decompressing the kernel, I would lose communication with the monitor, every single time. While I realized that there most likely exists a simple, elegant solution, I just wanted my #@$! mouse to work. So now I played with the backported modules and a new 2.2.19 kernel image (binary, not custom-compiled). Again, this didn't really work. I jabbed yet another eye out and just plugged in the adapter.

OK, now X configuration goes much more smoothly. That's cool, I'm up now. Well, it's time to eat some raw fish with wasabi and Kirin Ichiban and watch a chick flick (after all, Mrs. Volio is putting up with some serious geek time). Come back home and attack in the morning.

Back to the battle! Everything is happy now, I've even gotten GNOME installed. Then I wanted to install the lizard. That... umm... didn't go well. libc problems and whatnot. The latest version is 0.9.5 but Ximian only has 0.9.3 out. OK, you suck, I jab out one more eye and install the slow, buggy beta that came with Ximian GNOME 1.4. But I'm on the net!

Now how do I run Nautilus (archived link, may no longer work, try this one)? OK, there's the binary, no need to compile... god it's slow! But it sure does look purty...

So when do I declare victory? Only one thing left: sound. But thanks to the magic of IRC, I quickly learn that the permissions on /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer are, well, funky. But a quick application of chmod and away we go!

I'm beeping, I'm rocking, I'm rolling... Debian, I 0wnz3d y00! OK, not so much, but hey, I felt good. I even answered quite a few questions in #debian, so I'm paying the community back.

To be continued: C'mere, sparky!