So, as you can see from a
previous post, I was having troubles with OS X finder and SMB shares from Samba on Debian. This ended up with me
submitting a bug to Debian - if you follow the thread there, you'll see that it got traced to the 2.2 Linux kernel.
Today, I decided to upgrade the kernel on my Debian server to a 2.4 release, to see if it fixed the issue. As an overview:
apt-get update
apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.18-686
then editied lilo.conf (as suggested by apt) to include initrd=/initrd.img in the image=/vmlinuz stanza, and finally ran
lilo
to commit the boot loader changes.
Pretty easy, huh?
Reboot the server, and the network card has disappeared. Arse.
It seems that this is because the 2.4 kernel is more modular than 2.2, so some kernel modules now need to be added by hand (even though support was there in 2.2).
After a bit of digging about, I found the answer, and in typical Debian style, it is straightforward. You just run a utility
modconf
as root, and it gives you a curses-based menu system. Select network card drivers, and the appropriate module (mine was the eepro100 module, to support an Intel Corp 82557/8/9 (Ethernet Pro 100) NIC) and it just installs the kernel module for you.
Final reboot (I like to make sure everything is committed and will survive reboots without further config), and we're back in business.
I must say, Debian is not as beautiful as Fedora or SuSE as it uses old versions of everything in the interests of stability and reliability, but it sure does work.
For a Linux desktop, I'd lean towards something with a recent version of KDE or Gnome, but for a server, Debian seems stable and secure, and the apt-get stuff is superb (although I have found that Fedora makes a better print server in my environment, as it uses CUPS).
I think it will be time to check out
Sarge soon, although
Gentoo has recently tickled my interest as well. Oh, and I might want to take a peek at
Slackware now that version 10.0 is out, and I'm still only on Fedora Core 1 and
Fedora have released Core 2 now, and SuSE have
quietly released a free download of SuSE 9.1.......
