Andy Chase

A couple of weeks ago I got my first new computer in 3 1/2 years, a Compaq Presario something or other with a nice Athlon XP, DVD-R/CD-RW (32x write speed, a darn sight better than the 4x external HP I've been using), and a monstrous 80 Gigabyte hard drive.

I have to concede (sinister activation methods aside), WindowsXP is an improvement over 98 while incorporating some of the "power user" features of NT... but as spoiled as I've gotten by Mac OS X at work it wasn't long before I decided to devote a partition to Linux so I can have all of my command line tools back. (Cygwin is pretty good, but too often stuff won't compile correctly under Win32)

This time around I didn't feel like making the time investment to build a LFS system, and although I've always found RedHat to be easy to install, it always seems to install a lot of extraneous crap and I've never been impressed with the RPM package management system.

I decided upon Debian, which has always sounded interesting to me. I did an HTTP-based install, and with an astounding ~150K/Second download speed a full base install, including XFree86 and KDE 3, only took about an hour.

Yesterday I decided I wanted to upgrade the kernel from 2.2 to 2.4 because I want to get my Creative Extigy set up with the available Linux driver.

The first kernel I tried was 2.4.18, from the stable packages, but I ran into all kinds of problems with my particular Ethernet card, which uses the RealTek 8139 chipset; the 2.4 kernel uses the 8139too module instead of the older rtl8139 module used by the 2.2 kernel. The only problem is a bug somewhere in the kernel code (I think) that hosed support for the 8139. I manged to determine that the problem is fixed in kernel 2.4.20, and off I went.

At first I thought I was having the same problem with my network card; I would reboot and have no connectivity, and restarting network services proved fruitless... I tried installing the dhclient package, but that didn't work either. Then I read something about pump, and sure enough pump -i eth0 grabbed an IP address and got me onto my home network in a snap... but only when I ran it manually; it didn't work during startup.

Finally, as I started my second cup of coffee this morning, I came across a post instructing hapless users in my situation to make sure that CONFIG_FILTER is set to y in the kernel source .config file. After recompiling and rebooting for the umpteenth time in the last 24 hours, it worked! And it's only 9:00 AM! I have all day to tear my hair out trying to get sound out of my Extigy.