fedora vs. Debian?

[Aldo]

Hi Jan:

On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 11:33:54AM +1000, Jan and Bertil Smark Nilsson wrote:
> Both Fedora and Debian have problems with my Hardware. They both choose 
> the wrong driver for my network card. 

I have a news pc since a few months, and th ethernet card was 
immediately found and supported under Etch, while no any driver can be 
found under the Sarge: for very recent hardware, use a very recent 
distro with a very recent kernel aso.

>In Fedora it's easy, just change the 
> alias eth0 in modprobe.conf. I haven't found an equally easy way of doing 
> it in Debian yet. 

for persistent problems with hardware, let some sighted person 
enable/disable things in your BIOS.
You will also set soundchips disabled for the problem you explain here 
below,
+ if not sure blacklising teh name of the sound chipset in the 
appropriate dire, under Debian Sarge : /etc/hotplug/blacklist.d/
(touch name of the module to clacklist, example: touch ehci_hcd
or snd_via82xx if your pc have a VIA Technology sound chip).

>I also have two soundcards installed and both distros 
> choose the wrong one (which doesn't work) most of the time.

In fact the right one is always loaded using OSS; but when you switch to 
ALSA, if the "wrong" one isn't set disabled in your BIOS, it will still 
be considered as card0, and that's the problem with ALSA:
IMHO, when some people choose for an external soundcard, I suppose that 
they do taht for quality reasons; it should be logical if ALSA uses by 
default the last found card, not the first one. 

> If you use Fedora, you'll find it easier to keep up to date with Orca and 
> Firefox and other GUI related programs thanks to the work being done by 
> private individuals. The same goes for Ubuntu. With Debian you have to do 
> this work yourself, which isn't really a big deal.

I've not tried Orca yet, but it will of course be an Ubuntu if I do taht 
one of these rainy days!
 
> I tried the Edgy live CD but I never managed to get Gnome to work even 
> though I fiddled around with it quite a bit.
> 
> All in all, I think I'll stay with Debian and just try to keep up with the 
> Gnome upgrades.

Maybe we have t obe patient until the Etch will be released, the stable 
Deb is 3 years old now.
 
> Bertil Smark Nilsson

Very nice feedback. Thnx!

Aldo.