[ltp] LibraNet 2.7 on 770X, Dell desktop

[Harry Mangalam]

A few data points for those interested:

Looking for an easy to install Debian distro, I coughed up the ~$50 & installed
LibraNet 2.7 on my thinkpad 770x, an old 2xPPro, and a Dell P4 UniP IDE with a
Firewire card.

Briefly, all things went extremely well.  Very impressed.

The text based install went pretty smoothly on the Thinkpad, tho it had problems
installing anything but a reiserfs file system (but since that's what I wanted,
no biggie).  It detected the video card, ethernet, drives, pcmcia sockets (and
config'ed the wired ethernet (an old 10Mbit NE2000 clone card) and wireless
DLink650 (prism) card transparently(!) - pull one, insert the other and the
connection is restored - uses the same IP.  Only glitch was the sound, which it
detected correctly but wouldn't config automatically, so I had to do that with
sndconfig - very easy.

It would NOT completely configure to recognize my USB visor (dmesg says it found
it, but would not allow Kpilot to sync with it).  Ditto with a Nikon 990 digital
camera going thru the USB port.  Again, the port noted a new device but the app
or the kernel refused to completely recognize it.

The Dell desktop (forgot the model - a recent P4 1.8GHz) configured everything
perfectly (sound included) smooth as silk, INCLUDING the firewire add-in card.
Plugging in an external firewire drive was a no-brainer (and is it fast!!).

Also tried to use IOMEGA's firewire Peerless removable HD and with a little
futzing, was able to get it to recognize the drive host and acccess the drive
itself, altho ejecting and re-mounting the drive was not completely transparent
- neat device tho..

Can't address USB on the Dell tho since I didn't have any USB devices to play with.

The old Toshiba 2xPPro server installed very easily as well, with the proviso
about the reiserfs file system - recognized all the components (but did not
install an SMP kernel - I guess that has to be custom config'ed) including the
old Matrox video card, on-board Crystal Sound, built-in Intel Etherexpress, and
built-in Adaptec SCSI.  Beautiful, fast install.

The updates and installs with apt-get are so effortless compared to rpm that it
boggles the mind.

Based on these installs, I'll be changing my real work lappie (A22p) and more
recent 2xPIII server over to it as well.

-- 
Cheers, Harry
Harry J Mangalam - 949 856 2847 (v&f) - hjm@tacgi.com
              <<plain text preferred>>


-- 
Cheers, Harry
Harry J Mangalam - 949 856 2847 (v&f) - hjm@tacgi.com
             <<plain text preferred>>