Hi, I am new to the world of Debian. I hail from a previously mixed world of Gentoo and Windows - but I found that sometimes Gentoo was just a tad too bleeding edge for my tastes - and as such it's package management system often broke more than it fixed.

Well anyhoo I have a few questions about Knoppix/Debian which I hope some of you guys might not mind answering too much,

The first thing I noticed is that on the HDD install the kernel sources aren't included. No big problem you might think, But then I have no idea how to obtain them through apt-get. I read on the apt-get tutorial sticky at the head of this forum that if I want to install a package I just have to type apt-get install packagename (or if I want to avoid debians somewhat antiquated repository - apt-get install unstable packagename). However what if I don't know the specific package name of what I'm looking for? I mean how do I search apt to see what is available? In gentoo if I wanted to serach for something all I had to do was type 'emerge search package name'' and every available reference to that specific package in the various gentoo databases would be displayed. I could then select from the list the specific package name and version which was of most relevance to me. Is there a similar way to search the apt repositories?

In any case when I did try a minor apt-get install operation as a test (I did apt-get install unstable synaptic) I simply get an error message saying:

Code:
root@smegalot:/home/knoppix# apt-get install unstable synaptic
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
W: Couldn't stat source package list http://non-us.debian.org ./ Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/non-us.debian.org_%7ekitame_mozilla_._Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: Couldn't stat source package list http://people.debian.org sid/i386/ Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/people.debian.org_%7ebranden_packages_sid_i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
E: Couldn't find package unstable
root@smegalot:/home/knoppix#
I read in the forum I should add the -t switch (although I'm not sure what it does) so that it read apt-get install -t unstable synaptic. If I do this I get what looks like a more promising message - and the package does get downloaded and the install process begins, but towards the end it seems to crap out with this message:

Code:
Setting up xml-core (0.06) ...

Setting up sgml-data (2.0) ...

Setting up docbook-xml (4.2-9) ...

Setting up libxml2 (2.6.5-1) ...

Setting up libxslt1.1 (1.1.2-3) ...

Setting up libxslt1 (1.1.2-3) ...

Setting up libscrollkeeper0 (0.3.14-5) ...

Setting up libzvt2.0-0 (2.0.1cvs20021009-4) ...

Setting up scrollkeeper (0.3.14-5) ...
Rebuilding the database. This may take some time.

Setting up synaptic (0.47-1) ...

W: Couldn't stat source package list http://non-us.debian.org ./ Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/non-us.debian.org_%7ekitame_mozilla_._Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: Couldn't stat source package list http://people.debian.org sid/i386/ Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/people.debian.org_%7ebranden_packages_sid_i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
root@smegalot:/home/knoppix# apt-get -t unstable install genkernel
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
W: Couldn't stat source package list http://non-us.debian.org ./ Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/non-us.debian.org_%7ekitame_mozilla_._Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: Couldn't stat source package list http://people.debian.org sid/i386/ Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/people.debian.org_%7ebranden_packages_sid_i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: Couldn't stat source package list http://non-us.debian.org ./ Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/non-us.debian.org_%7ekitame_mozilla_._Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: Couldn't stat source package list http://people.debian.org sid/i386/ Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/people.debian.org_%7ebranden_packages_sid_i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
However upon checking, the latest version of synapic appears to be installed. I of course followed the instructions and ran apt-get update - but I am still getting these error messages, and as such I am simply concerned as to whether they are significant?

Also what does the -t switch do? I ask as without it apt-get doesn't seem to want to do anything. Are there any other switches I should know of that would prove helpful?

Finally one thing I feared would happen and that has happend is that when I installed to my harddisk I lost quite a lot of the excellent hardware detection that the Knoppix CD appears to be able to do. At the moment the most frustrating of these is the lack of support for my Audigy 2.0 sound card (and specifically for SPDIF out) and the lack of any attempt to use the official ati XFree drivers for 3D acceleration. Does anyone have any advice on either how to get the drivers for these or how to get them working? If anyone has any experience of this, your advice would be deeply appreciated. When I was using the CD in order to enable digital out from my audigy 2 card, all I had to do was type alsa at the boot prompt.

I just hope now that I have moved over to Linux completely and no longer have Windows on any of my systems that setting up Knoppix won't take the month or so that setting up Gentoo did. The only thing I will miss about Gentoo is their very friendly and amazingly helpful user forums - but I'm sure you guys can at least match that!

Anyway, these are only really quite small problems and beyond this all has gone smoothly. If I can just get Knoppix working as well as the CD did, with the same level of excelent hardware detection I'm sure I will have a great distro on my hands.

Best regards,

GJ