The tribulations of Linux

[lethargic_man]

Generally, I like Linux. I'm very comfortable in it, and have my environment set up just the way I like it, and get infuriated it at less often than I do at Windows... but when you want to do something you haven't done before and don't know how to do it can be such a long and painful process finding out from the Web.

In this case, I have a CD-ROM writer with PC-card and parallel port connections. My laptop, luminiferous, has a PC-card slot, so all was well and good burning CDs from there (until recently, but I'm not sure whether the problem is with luminiferous or the CD-ROM burner). The problem is with my desktop, epicyclic, which doesn't have a PC-card slot. Now there are parallel port IDE drivers, including a driver for my CD-ROM burner that come as standard with Linux... but they don't seem to be compiled into the kernel that comes with Red Hat. To use them, I need to recompile my kernel, something scary I haven't done before. I spent quite some while alternating between looking into this and displacing from it a few months ago, and then put it aside to do something else.

Now I'm trying to pick up the pieces... only have discovered I don't seem to have made any notes as I went along. My mail archive says "I tried installing the kernel source from an RPM this weekend, only to find a dependency on XFree86, which isn't included on the CD-ROMs as Fedora Core 2 doesn't use it." Only I've got a vague memory that I did compile the kernel, and it took all night. In which case, where is it? /usr/src/linux-2.6.5-1.358? Oh dear oh dear; I can tell it's going to take me ages to find all this out again. (Have I wibbled about this here before?)

My father suggests I should just buy a PC-card to USB converter, for a tenner... only that feels like giving in. I have the drivers available for parallel port support, right here on my hard disk. All I have to do is figure out how to use them.

And then I can back to figuring out why when I try to record sound it keeps switching from working to not working, with var/log/messages saying "modprobe: FATAL: Error running install command for sound_slot_1" (why's it trying to do that? what's wrong with sound_slot_0?). *sigh* It's always an uphill struggle trying to do something new on Linux.

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

There isn't an inherent dependency on X just to configure and build a kernel - it includes graphical configuration tools as well as the text-mode one but you don't have to use them. RH's package might nonetheless declare a dependency, I wouldn't know.