Hi all. Well, I got that 8gb drive working in my old box that had its previous drive go bad. It's become my spair "play" box, and is currently running debian. When I get familiar enough with debian, I plan to play with redhat, and maybe with freebsd if I can install and use that over ssh or telnet or a serial console. That's all in the future though. I do have a few debian questions. I will admit that I didn't bother reading that long debian book on the debian site, and am just flying with my experience with slackware and some debian hints I picked up from this list here and there. My questions are as follows. 1. I want to build my own kernel. Can I just grab the standard sources from kernel.org, or do I need some dep package. If so, which one? 2. Somebody had said here that there was a speakup source package for debian. If this is correct, and if I need to get a dep package from question 1 above, then do I also need to get this speakup source package, or can I just patch the kernel tree with the standard speakup 1.5 tarball? If I need to get this speakup source package, then again, what package name am I looking for? 3. I installed using the woody floppies on linux-speakup.org, and the internet for the rest. I understand that there are newer distros since woody. Is there a way for me to upgrade my current install to the newest stable distro? If so, then how? 4. Since the woody disks seemed to have no dhcp client, I had to install the module for my network card, and to assign it a static ip. These changes seemed to have carried over into the actual distro install on the hd. When I build my own kernel, I plan to build the network card support right into the kernel, and to use dhcpcd. I don't have a problem with looking around in /etc/init.d, and changing whatever I want manually. However, coming from slackware, which doesn't have such a strict package management system, I am afraid to do this, since I might break something in the package management system somewhere. How safe am I messing with things manually, and how do I know if/when it's time for the system to take care of things? I'm not asking this question in the way I'd like, but I'm hoping someone here who might have moved from slackware to debian will understand what I'm trying to ask. I would very much appreciate any answers/advise. Thanks in advance. Greg -- Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager at EU.org
