Hello!
I've come up with a bunch of practical questions around the Debian Slink
distribution:
1) There isn't a group 'shutdown' to whom add people allowed to shutdown,
while I often find a need for it in many environments: is there another way
(i.e. "The Debian Right Way") to do it?
2) /cdrom isn't given an entry in /etc/passwd after a fresh install, even if
it has been used during all the installation and there is a /cdrom
directory for it: this is a note for the next installation procedure
3) make-kpkg rebuilds all of the kernel after every single change: if I just
compiled a kernel and wanted to add, say, a module, everything gets
recompiled instead of just the few required files: is there a clean way to
allow this? Can I just set do_clean := NO in debian/rules?
4) It has been a pain for me to install in a SCSI only environment with an
Adaptec 2940UW Pro host adapter: no way to see it until I found reference
to the alternative install disk for the 2940 searching debian-user.
Installing from that disk and the plain official slink cd's also didn't
install on the hard disk the patched kernel, so I needed to boot the system
with rescue=/dev/sda1, install the kernel from the floppy and rerun lilo.
Is there some distribution specific troubleshooting page on the Debian web
server to provide help for troubles that came up after the official
release, like pointers for alternative boot disks like the Adaptec one or
the Gnome slink staging area, tips, specific faq and such?
5) On a server I installed (hamm upgraded to slink), the wwwoffle daily
maintenance script happen to kill the wwwoffle daemon; I didn't happen to
discover why is it doing this, and I can't just work around it putting
/etc/init.d/wwwoffle start as the last line in the maintenance script
because I can't guess what state wwwoffle was before being killed (e.g.
online, offline, autodial)
6) SSH came with unencrypted communcation disabled at compile time; I run a
network in a secure environment and want to use ssh for its cryptographical
authentication, but allow it to operate unencrypted when connecting to
local hosts, since there's no risk of network snooping and I want to avoid
unnecessary computation. Couldn't the option be disallowed by default in a
system wide configuration file instead of compile time? This isn't an
important issue, however, because one can suppose that if I'm smart enough
to tell when an environment is secure, then I'm smart enough to download
the source package and recompile it. I just wanted to point it out.
7) apmd: I often get these two errors printed on console, the first one when
going back and forth from X and the latter instead of a monitor switchoff
after the usual 10 (?) minutes of no operation on console:
apm: set display ready: Unrecognized device ID
apm: set display standby: Unrecognized device ID
Why? What do they mean? Why isn't it switching off my monitor and how can I
get it to do it? X's dpmi is working well, instead.
And, while I'm on apm: is there some walkthrough to configure apm to do
everything to lower power consumption (i.e. turn off hard drives, set the
cpu to low power mode, switch off the monitor, whatever else) even if I'm
not using a laptop? It could be interesting to have a server (e.g. a print
server, or a local diald masquerading connection manager, or an intranet
web server, or both) that needs not to be switched off after work time, but
can use the least possible power when inactive until maintenance time
overnight and sit sleeping again until the first connection the next
morning: what are all the exact things I need to do for this? How can I
configure apm (I found no configuration files for it, except the two empty
suspend.d/resume.d directories in /etc/apm)? Where do I disable --MARK--
lines in log files that turn on hard disks? What are slink's standard
periodical events (e.g. mail checks) that I should disable, or set not to
be run beyond work time, or better, not to be be run when the system is in
low-power mode? Is this last thing possible, and if it is, how?
8) I've never been able to use the multi_cd access method of dselect: I always
happen to see only the contents of the first cd, while with apt I need
every cd mounted to see them both. For the former, I know it's my fault,
for the latter I understood I have to wait for potato to be able to use apt
with multiple cd: am I right? And for multi_cd, what's the right way of
operation? I have never been asked for the second CD.
9) Less Debian specific, but very important: :) how can I configure a key
combination in Enlightenment to behave like WindowMaker's Raise/Lower
action? (i.e. raise a window or send it to back if it's already on top: it
allows you to switch between your applications like skimming a pile of
photos) I can't find an action for it in Enlightenment's configuration
editor and I hardly believe there's no way of doing it.
10) Debian is a beautiful thing.
Here's my bunch of questions and feedback, and I look forward to the answers.
Bye and TYA, Enrico
--
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