Quote Originally Posted by raid517
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.
Welcome to Debian.

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.
Usually apt-get install kernel-source-2.??.?? but with knoppix you need:
Code:
 deb http://developer.linuxtag.net/knoppix ./
In your /etc/apt/sources.list to get the package you are probably better off getting the source from either the official Debian repositories or from the kernel.org if you plan on building your own kernel if you are just compiling a driver the kernel headers are included so you should have all you need to compile unless it needs the entire tree available so drivers are like that.


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?
apt-cache search package_name_or_term and apt-cache policy package_name will tell you which package version will be installed along with which branch of the archives it will be installed from. apt-cache show package_name will give a detailed description of the package and dependencies.


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_Pac kages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
You need to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list and put a # character in front of the offending lines for the sources to comment them out they are no longer valid the packages have moved locations. The new line for the packages that were at people.debian.org/~braden for example.

Code:
## XFree 4.2/4.3
#deb http://people.debian.org/~branden/packages sid/i386/
#deb-src http://people.debian.org/~branden/packages sid/source/
#deb http://www.penguinppc.org/~daniels/sid/i386 ./
#deb-src http://www.penguinppc.org/~daniels/sid/source ./

## Expermential needed for XFree86 4.3 for the KDE 3.2
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian ../project/experimental main contrib non-free

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?
The -s switch is invaluable it simulates the actions of apt and stops you from making stupid mistakes by not paying attention there are many, many more I would suggest man apt-get. The -t tells apt which branch you wish to install the packages from BTW.

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.
Use in a console window after having used su to become root /etc/init.d/alsa-autoconfig and edit the file /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh and put the line aumix -w 75 -v 75 to have the default volumes set on boot or you may want to use in a console window alsamixer to check other options for the card. Kano has a script to install the driver once you have installed to the HD never used the ATI but the Nvidia ones work well.