Debian help, please

[Bill Freeman]

	I thought that I'd try the LUG before I go more global.

	I've been a RedHat/Fedora guy for a long time.

	I have a couple of new (to me) machines to install on, so I'm
trying some other distributions.  (Gentoo on one of them.  Man, does
kde take a long time to compile!  Don't set up to build -j2 if you've
only got 64Mb.  When two compiles have a RSS together greater than
available RAM, and that often happens doing a stage 1 gentoo, you drop
to a few percent of your machine's performance.)

	One is a Compaq Presario 1200Z.  I sucessfully shrank the NTFS
partition with XP on it (not permanently my laptop) and burned myself
a net install CD, and installed woody.  (I figured that stable would
be wiser until I'm wiser.)  All well and good.  I even got it to
install the tulip driver on boot, though I'm still running dhclient -e
eth0 by hand.

	But, no sound.  Some fooling around later I realized that its,
at least in part, because I wound up with kernel 2.2.20-idepci
(probably because that was what was on the netinstall CD?), and the
idepci versions have no sound support.

	So I did an install of 2.2.20, the full version.  Yeah, 2.4 is
in the apt accessible stuff, but I figured I'd take baby steps.  And
it boots, all well and good.  But 1. still no sound, even when I
modprobe via82cxxx_audio (which is what works for knoppix); and 2.
the tulip driver will no longer load (something about device busy,
I'll get the real message if desired, but that's a ways back, see
below).  Yes, the error message implies that it's attempting to load
tulip.o from the correct subdirectory tree of /lib/modules.

	OK, so maybe the 2.2 stuff isn't being kept up and tested as
well as one might hope, it being a few versions back and all, So I
tried 2.4.18-k7, which hangs initializing USB stuff.  There's a
sticker on the laptop that says Duron, but uname reports i686.  Yes I
got the initrd stuff straight.

	So next I take two steps back and try 2.4.16-i386.  This boots
fine, will happily modprobe via82cxxx_audio, and kde's sound server no
longer complains (though I haven't heard any sound yet).


	But, tulip still won't load (no such device this time from
tulip.o's init_module).

	Any insights?

							Bill