The third time was the charm and I finally got RC1.3 installed on the troublesome Turion laptop. For the first time ever, the default kernel installed without hanging and I didn't have to select another kernel. I got my wireless with WPA going without much trouble except for the very laborious and cryptic way it has to be done. I have my nfs network working and am able to share files with my other Linux systems.
That's the good part. Now for the bad part: ONCE AGAIN, MY SOUND ISN'T WORKING! Same problem as before--Audacious shows bars when I play a music file but no sound comes from the speakers. Alsamixer calls it an HDA NVidia card with SigmaTel STAC9200 chip using the snd-hda-intel driver. The frustrating part is that sound worked perfectly right out of the box in RC1 with the 2.6.22.10sm kernel. I was expecting the same to continue with this kernel, but no. We're right back where we started. The *only* time sound has worked on this laptop was with RC1 and 2.6.22.10sm.
Please, please tell me what to do to get sound working. It's absolutely essential.
I haven't used GSlapt yet. I took a loot at VASMCC. It looks very nice with the icons and all and I'm sure would be more appealing to newbies than the text-look of VASM. However, when you click to get the actual setting in VASMCC, you're back at the text look and I find it kind of jarring. I believe spiffing that up is planned. It'll be a good addition. When I select File System-Backup System, I get this when I try to do a manual backup:
No /etc/backupsys.conf. Do nothing then.
This is cryptic. What creates /etc/backupsys.conf? There's no explanation for the user. In the past, Backup System automatically backed up a bunch of files in /etc. I don't understand what Backup System is supposed to do and how do I get it to do it manually?
I have a suggestion for /usr/share/fonts/TTF. There are many,many fonts for non-Western languages. This makes a very long font list and is of no use for those who aren't using a particular language. While I fully endorse having many language fonts available, they shouldn't be loaded for everyone by default. Why not put those non-Western language fonts into a directory of their own? It could be made a font directory and be listed in xorg.conf and fonts.conf, but could be easily turned off by those who don't need these fonts simply by putting a # at the beginning of the line for the non-Western font directory in xorg.conf. As it is now, I create a /usr/share/moved_fonts directory, move the /OTF and /cyrillic directories to moved_fonts, and go through /TTF so I can send the fonts I'll never use to /moved_fonts.
I haven't yet installed RC1.3 on my Celeron desktop and probably won't intall it on the Celeron laptop, as I like having a reference point for RC1.
Will report as I do more testing.
--GrannyGeek