by julian67 on Wed Mar 05, 2008 11:02 pm
Today I installed Antix onto my desktop (replacing Xubuntu Gutsy) and came up against a few problems. 1st is easy. I use a Zydas wireless adapter (USB) whose driver is part of the Linux kernel. The firmware should be in /lib/firmware/zd1211 but in Antix the folder is missing and the firmware is directly in /lib/firmware/. Unfortunately the driver won't load unless the zd1211 folder is present and the firmware inside it. I don't know if this is a Mepis thing or specific to Antix but either way it's an easy fix.
Problem No.2: this was a stinker. My desktop connects to the router wirelessly, all good once the firmware issue above was dealt with. It also has an ethernet port which I use for my LAN so I need to run a DHCP server with static IP so I can set up NAT. The /etc/network/interfaces files is heavily modified in Mepis so that the mnetwork tool can work. It is possible to allocate a static IP, but allocating one without a gateway specified (as required for DHCP server) causes mnetwork to fail (killing all connections) because it requires one to be specified in /etc/network/interfaces. As long as mnetwork and its version of the interfaces file is in place the DHCP server fails to start. I ended up having to remove --purge mnetwork and replace it with the network-manager backend. It seems mnetwork is fine for desktop use but not once you need to serve DHCP.
3rd problem: I wanted to preserve all the important data in /home when changing to Antix. I removed all the Xubuntu config files including .xinitrc, .ICEauthority and so on so that I was left with my personal data and some data+config files for stuff like my browser settings, email client, feedreader etc. On installing Antix the first time I followed the option to re-use home but the installer failed to write .fluxbox, .xinitrc and so on, so I had to log on in the shell and then startX. On 2nd install attempt (all my /home is backed up) I allowed the installer to format /home and it worked as expected (but left me the task of copying about 35GB of data from my backups). It seems to me that the installer can only re-use /home if it's the home of a previous Antix/Mepis install, otherwise it installs / but adds nothing to /home.