Re: Anyone help a newbie?

From: ERACC (junkmail_at_eracc.com)
Date: 01/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 11:45:13 -0600

On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:41:04 +0000, Paul wrote:

[...]
> Firstly, I have the choice of SuSE 8.1 Professional (7 CDs); Mandrake 9.2 (3
> CDs); Redhat 9 (3 CDs) - any particularly suited to a newcomer?

Mandrake. My company installs that exclusively for NewBs that get a
new PC preloaded with Linux. No complaints to date. :-)

> Secondly, when I had a play with SuSE, I got it up and running fine, apart
> from not being able to get some hardware working - including my modem,
> unfortunately... It's the Alcatel SpeedTouch USB for ADSL (yes, the
> frog/stingray type thing) - I downloaded what claimed to be drivers from
> http://linux-usb.sourceforge.net/, but couldn't find anywhere to do anything
> with them...
[...]

First of all USB sucks. :-) I'll recommend switching to an ethernet
ADSL modem first. Easier to use and much less "flakey".

That said. The Alcatel USB driver is experimental. Says so right
there on the "Device Driver Support" page. So YMMV from others that
use it. If you see http://linux-usb.sourceforge.net/SpeedTouch/ you
will notice that it states:

  2003-08-25 Speedtouch in mainline kernel

  The just-released 2.4.22 kernel contains the speedtouch kernel
  module. Thanks Marcello!

If you install Mandrake 9.2 your default kernel just happens to be
kernel-2.4.22.10mdk-1-1mdk which should already have the kernel
driver module included (according to the information above found on
the page above). Thus, with MDK 9.2, you should not have to do
anything other than have the USB <spit> modem plugged in and powered
up during install. If that does not work then it is a simple matter
to run 'modprobe <stupidusbcraphere>' as root to get the module
loaded while the OS is up. Then add a line or two to
/etc/modules.conf to make sure it loads on every bootup, ta daaa,
you're done.

If there is more to "it" than that why suffer the headaches? So I
will end this with ...

Last of all USB sucks. :-) I'll recommend switching to an ethernet
ADSL modem finally. Easier to use and much less "flakey".

HTH,
Gene (e-mail: gene \a\t eracc \d\o\t com) 

-- 
Linux era4.eracc.UUCP 2.4.22-26mdkenterprise i686
 11:18:22 up 1 day, 21:54, 13 users,  load average: 0.09, 0.02, 0.01
ERA Computer Consulting - http://www.eracc.com/
eCS, OS/2, Mandrake GNU/Linux, OpenServer & UnixWare resellers

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