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new distros, new problems, little help please.

post #1 of 9
10/1/04 at 8:35pm
Thread Starter 
Well...i took a dive for the latest Debian-based Ubuntu linux (instead of my old Mandrake 10 install) which has kernel 2.6.8.1-2-amd64-generic. So far so good, except for this one has GNOME and I favor KDE a bit more personaly.

The problems it fixed that were unresolved from mandrake:
-Battery managment. Now it shows me the % battery i have left, shows me when (and % of) when i am charging and lets me tweak some settings for longer life.
-Finaly can get some use out of my AMD64, no more 32-bit hell for me.

Problems to arrive with this distro:
1-Can't find flash plugin for firefox. I googled some and didn't find any. This really blows. I tried the official linux flash installer and it gave me an error saying it doesn't support 64 bit architecture.
2-Although Mandrake recognized my wifi, it just failed to install, this thing has all the utilities to make this baby wi-fi ready, except for, it can't find my card. Any clue on how I make it recognize it? (Gigabyte GN-WPEAG)

Some other interesting things that would be cool.
-we all know the great k3b, how do I burn cds in Gnome?
-I've seen screenshots where Gnome has a OS X type dock, how do I make one?
-Is there a way to install KDE on a Debian based distro?
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post #2 of 9
10/1/04 at 9:23pm
For CD burning, you've got a couple of choices: GnomeToaster, Coaster, Nautilus CD Burner, ... Check out http://sites.inka.de/~W1752/cdrecord/frontend.en.html.

Yes, you can install KDE on a Debian-based distro (assuming the package system hasn't changed much from Debian's). Don't know where you get your distro's packages from, but you can install it from the vanilla Debian mirrors. 'apt-get install kde' works pretty great. Then, all you got to do is 'update-alternatives --config x-window-system' (I think that's the one--the thing you have to configure may have a slightly different name).

On a side note, if you like/are not afraid of the command-line, I suggest you 'apt-get install aptitude'. It is a CLI front-end for apt and can show you all available, installed, upgradable, ... packages on your system.

EDIT: Don't know about making an OS X like dock in Gnome, but you can find more information about this kind of stuff on http://www.kde-look.org/ and http://themes.freshmeat.net/. Searching for 'aqua' and 'dock' brings up a lot of stuff.

Regards,

zakaluka2.
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post #3 of 9
10/1/04 at 9:35pm
As for your 64-bit flash plug-in, I've found numerous people bitching on Macromedia's boards about not having a 64-bit flash plug-in. They seem to have removed those posts, but you can still see them through Google's cache.

What you could do is what some Gentoo users do. Install 32- and 64-bit libraries, install a multilib gcc. Then, you can install a 32-bit version of firefox and install the 32-bit flash plug-in on top of that. This should work.

Regards,

zakaluka2.
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post #4 of 9
10/1/04 at 10:17pm
Well, for the wireless modem, I couldn't find anything for the Gigabyte wireless chipset, but you could try the DriverLoader from LinuxAnt (http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader...e0d0c80a9d74f0 -- Link may not work due to PHP session ID). Try NDISWrapper (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net) also.

Regards,

zakaluka2.
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post #5 of 9
10/1/04 at 11:04pm
Thread Starter 
from what i know madwifi should make my wifi work, but i haven't been able to successfully compile it on any of the distros i tried (Suse 9.1 personal, Suse 9.1 Pro, Mandrake 10 offical, Ubuntu for AMD64) Hmm...so i guess I have to downgrade back to the 32 bit world to get flash and all that junk. Now as for what distro. Bayanihan looks very awesome, has all the latest packages of everything, but sadly their site is down and I can't find any download mirrors.
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post #6 of 9
10/2/04 at 12:43am
Thread Starter 
...that was a brief night. As of right now i am in Xandros 2.1 and i am shocked by how craptastic and windows-looking it is. Well..I do have power managment, will try to get wifi to work. Everything else seems to be working. If this distro works, maybe I'll upgrade to the business edition (using free distro version right now)
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post #7 of 9
10/2/04 at 4:58pm
@abf: please save yourself the pain and use Debian (Sarge) Unstable

Everything works on my lappy... my power management even gets me longer batt. life than winblows.
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post #8 of 9
10/2/04 at 5:33pm
Thread Starter 
i dug up my old cd of the latest Yoper release and installed it. So far setting everything up, still haven't gotten to madwifi nor kdeutils but with time...i like it. but i can't figure out how to use the god damn apt-get feature.
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post #9 of 9
10/3/04 at 2:54pm
put the following lines in /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable main non-free contrib

If dselect is installed, run it, select the update option. Then select install, and it will update your system.
If dselect is not installed, do `apt-get update` and then `apt-get install` to install the updated packages.

If you prefer GUI tools, install synaptic.
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