Damn Small Linux - Not!

mz__jo · Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 5 Location: Limoges,France

I downloaded and burnt DSL-N 0.1 RC1 last night and booted it to see if the bugs that I found in the alpha version were still there. They were!
In order: 1) The PPPoE configuration tool does not work. It detects my network card but fails to find an access concentrator. The configuration tool works fine with DSL 2.4 (the proof, I am using DSL 2.4 to connect and write this). Does DSL-N use kernel 2.6 (which I believe has no native support for PPPoE) and could this be a source of the problem?
2) Mplayer appears to have a bug trying to play audio. As my onboard sound chip is not configured correctly by Knoppix and variants thereof this may be the extent of the problem but as I had an error message in Mplayer as well I can't be sure. In the same situation with XMMS there is no error message, just no sound. Since DSL-N has no straight audio player I can't be more helpful.
3) The image viewer puts the images (in my case photos) half off the screen, masking at the same time the upper toolbar (which I have to assume should be there)
4) The keyboard map for fr latin9 is still not correct, no accented letters, no Alt Gr key combinations. Only consolation, @ which is normally an Alt Gr combination is here directly accessible (so if I had a web connection I could configure a mail client)

No web, no sound, unusable images, incomplete word-processing, thats run the complete range of my computing needs. It does mount all my partitions so its not all negative but I don't see any useful purpose for it from here until some of that is fixed. Cheers Jo

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

What a great post.

You already knew the answer to #1. Yes this is a 2.6 kernel and older support for some things is no longer there.

#2 again you already stated that no knoppix variant works for you. Yes, we are a knoppix variant and make no claims othewise

#3 What resolutioin are you running?

#4 You need to use xkeycaps for full foriegn language support. It is in the DSL respository.

But, I don't think any Knoppix 2.6 kernel based variant is going to satisfy your requirements, given #1 & #2
.

mz__jo · Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 5 Location: Limoges,France

Since I did not select a resolution at boot I assume that it is the default (760x1028 or something like that) and this is only a 15" monitor but with the image viewer I have a large chunk of screen not used. I will have to try using frame buffer and 800x600. Its very frustrating because there is no way of moving the image around.
The sound chip is always an odd problem because the only distro that works with it is Mandrake (I use 10 and Move, which is 10 based) which uses an ALSA Intel driver. Other distros which appear to select the right driver (such as Freesbie to give an example) still don't give any sound. I have not yet tried forcing the ALSA driver at boot with Knoppix to see if that works. For information the chip is an ADI 1888 on an ASUS mainboard with SIS 741GX chipset. The only real solution is to fit a separate PCI soundcard (SB or similar) but with only 2 PCI slots on the board (one of which I want to use for Wi-Fi) I am unwilling to go down this path.
On the keyboard I noted just after posting that DSL2.4 has exactly the same key map! I will try playing with your suggestion on 2.4 with a working net connection. Bear in mind that I am only a simple user, not a geek or other techie.
I would like to get DSL-N working properly because it is capable of mounting all my partitions which DSL cannot do (nothing to be ashamed of, I tried PC Linux OS afterwards and that finds all the partitions but can't find the folders on them!)
Cheers Jo

mz__jo · Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 5 Location: Limoges,France

I forgot to say that all this is with a live CD. Cheers Jo

[IDC]Dragon · Joined: 22 Apr 2006 Posts: 41 Location: Hannover, Germany

Maybe you'd want to try Kanotix (RC easter 2006 edition is the latest as of now), they have very recent drivers. To be bleeding edge seems to be a target of their project.

Peter · Joined: 20 Apr 2006 Posts: 51

When images are displayed so that the title bar is not visible, you can move the window using the pager until the title and menu bars are visible. Then just change the zoom level.
The error messege for mplayer is probably just telling you that it can't connect to your soundcard.

cbagger01 · Joined: 21 Apr 2006 Posts: 27

FYI

For Fluxbox window manager, you can drag windows around by holding the ALT key down while clicking and dragging with your mouse pointer.

Peter · Joined: 20 Apr 2006 Posts: 51

Thank You. There always seems to be a better way to do it. I've got to go and get some information on flux. I know there has to be all sorts of things I'm missing.

bryan · Joined: 04 Jun 2006 Posts: 2

Like the original poster, I had a problem with the pppoe configuration. The problem is that the pppoeconf script is written to use a version of mktemp other than the one on the disk -- it uses the -p option, which is not recognized by the provided version of mktemp. That causes the script to fail.