I’ve got a new project on my hands and decided that I’d like to use linux rather than a M$ solution. I’m building a full size arcade cabinet (I already have the cabinet and controls built, woo hoo!) and the goal is to run mame (xmame or advancemame) and Daphne (Dragons Lair, Space Ace emulator). Upon booting the system I’ll use some front end to launch the games…
(This is being done on a 2.8ghz P4 w/ 80gig IDE hard drive)
This is my first real step in to linux (aside from TiVo hacking which mostly consisted of following directions as opposed to doing a lot of this myself). I played with ubuntu and really liked it but I was having some compiling issues so I decided to play with Debian. They are very similar but I’m (somewhat) lost in certain areas…
I’m using Sarge with the 2.4 kernel. Will running the 2.6 kernel cause issues with any programs I plan to use or libraries I may need to compile things like Daphne?
I’m pretty familiar with apt-get and using aptitude from the command line but I used aptitude in a window, selected “add/remove programs” and found all of X11 and gnome gone. No idea why that happened!
Should I be using the “testing” sources rather than the “stable” if I want things to be up to date and have the latest libraries for compiling things like GLEW? If the “testing” sources are in my sources.list file will running apt-get upgrade automatically update everything to the latest versions (well, I guess “latest” is relative. From what I understand the files in “unstable” would be even more recent). If I have “stable”, “unstable”, and “testing” sources in my sources.list would running the apt-get upgrade load everything from “unstable” (I believe I saw a how-to on setting priorities though)?
I’ve downloaded most of the user guides from the Debian web site and I’m though about half of them but there are still a lot of unanswered questions… I guess this is a good start and I hope someone can point me in the right directions.
Currently I have Sarge running with 2.4.27-3-686 kernel (the 2.6.8-3-686 is on there also but I’m booting to 2.4) with the nvidia drivers installed. Based on the needs for compiling Daphne I have a pile of libraries installed as well.
Does anyone have any other suggestion on what I should be doing or looking in to based on my goals?
Sorry for all the questions and thanks for your help!!!
Scheduled Maintenance: We are aware of an issue with Google, AOL, and Yahoo services as email providers which are blocking new registrations. We are trying to fix the issue and we have several internal and external support tickets in process to resolve the issue. Please see: viewtopic.php?t=158230
Beginner with a project and lots of questions
Make the 2.6 kernel switch with a package first, and then any issues should be taken care of at that point. Once you're satisfied with the 2.6 kernel's operation, you can compile your own if you want to.
One advantage you'll get by starting with testing now is you'll be starting with x.org. No transitioning from XFree86 to do later. Some unstable packages actually are fairly stable, but you might still want to avoid unstable unless you're feeling adventurous. Since you're ok with compiling things yourself, you won't be in a situation of having to use unstable for there being no stable or testing version of the package you want.
aptitude is fine, but give Synaptic a try too.
One advantage you'll get by starting with testing now is you'll be starting with x.org. No transitioning from XFree86 to do later. Some unstable packages actually are fairly stable, but you might still want to avoid unstable unless you're feeling adventurous. Since you're ok with compiling things yourself, you won't be in a situation of having to use unstable for there being no stable or testing version of the package you want.
aptitude is fine, but give Synaptic a try too.
There are those who say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. I can only observe that those people never had dial-up Internet service. -- Frank Cagle