[Gnumed-devel] Finally got Debian on a machine

[Richard Terry]

For anyone on the list who is interested,  but who is a relative computer 
klutz like me:

I parted with some hard cash and purchased Libranet 2.8 ($AU105), and after 
spending a number of hours installing and fine tuning it on an older 20gig 
drive I must say I'm impressed. Quick to load, smooth to work, feels solid. 
I've been having some instability problems with Mandrake 9.1 which I never 
had with 8.2 and am fairly fed up with it.

Everything seems to work pretty much out of the box in contrast to several 
linux distributions - from the standard interfaces, to games such as 
flightgear, dvd player ogle etc. 

Their Xadminmenu (control panel) certainly takes the pain out of basic setup 
and maintenance and for a gui person like me the Synaptic graphic package 
management system is great when looking for packages, though apt-get install 
program on the command line is easier if you know what you are after.

===============
Difficulties encountered:
===============
Several problems with Win4Lin. I had to patch the kernel with with  
Kernel-Win4Lin3-2.4.20.patch and   -mki-adapter.patch and re-compile, and 
even that was relatively easy for me via the adminmenu (except a transient 
problem with the nvidia driver) though I will admit I got a bit of experience 
in compling kernels a while back when I bravely and successfully installed 
gentoo (took me about a week!)

Win4lin as it comes in rpm format only. After trying Alien which puts 
everything in a non standard place for win4lin, I just used rpm to install 
with --nodeps as otherwise rpm didn't know sh was in the path even though it 
was and wouldn't run

Xawtv had no sound which I traced to 0 line in volume as a default via aumix. 

No cd automount by default, but the libranet support database:
at  http://libranet.com/support/support.cgi?version=2.8#0351.html has many 
articles, including a blow by blow instruction for this.

The printer didn't configure on the way in but using webmin and cups it works 
fine.

Anyone interested for help who doesn't want to bother the list can email me 
directly for more of my experiences.

With regard to gnuMed I havn't downloaded that yet, I'll read the Doc's as a I 
seem to remember there where a few issues with it and Debian

Time will tell re the whole thing, Horst swears by Debian and has mentioned 
libranet, so I trust he is right.

Regards

Richard