Disclaimer: Lots of tech jargon
When I bought myself a personal computer late last year, I had a lot of things on my mind, but one thing stood on top, dictating all my choices: it had to be a gaming station! It’d been a whole lot of time since I’d freaked out with games like I used to, back in my college days. My first ever PC had set my father back by around INR 39,000. During those days, I could boast that my PC not only had support for DDR memory, but it ALSO had, surprise, surprise, an Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP)! I’d got 256 MB of DDR memory in that baby and man, was I happy!
I reminisced about those days when I started putting the specs together for this planned acquisition. I finally decided upon a system built around a Gigabyte GA 785GMT-USB3 mainboard powered by AMD Athlon II X4 Quad Core Processor with two GB of DDR 3. I decided that the onboard graphics package (ATI HD 4200) would serve me well with the stock of games that I had on hand, giving me some time to save up before planning to buy some high-end graphics monster. Besides, just around that time, the first of the directx 11 cards were out and I knew that given time, costs would go southwards.
Since I didn't want the horrifyingly dreadful Windows Vista on my machine, I'd told the vendor to load it up with Windows XP instead. I would be doing my own Linux installs. I'd asked for a lot of hard disk space to be left unpartitioned.
Now, I'd always wanted to have Debian on my machine, but somehow hadn't got around to installing it. I was instead relying on an Ubuntu live cd to boot into Linux whenever I needed to (read as whenever I needed to scan my windows disks for viruses. I prefer scanning my disks from Linux. It's a lot more reliable that way).
Now, a live cd is compact, quick and painless, but the biggest disadvantage is that it starts afresh, every time. It's not the same as an installed OS which you can customize. It's mainly for those who use it to evaluate an OS before installing it. However, I was just using it because I didn't want to install Ubuntu and was not getting around to installing Debian.
I finally got around to installing Debian last week. I'd created a repository dump of the entire Debian DVD collection amounting to about 20 GB, which I'd conveniently downloaded at the workplace (Oh, it was not misuse. Our shared desktop server needed it. It runs on Debian!) which meant that I could virtually install thousands of packages/applications without even the need of an internet connection. Now, this last part is very important, as I have a very pathetic internet solution at home (mobile GPRS). Debian installed very quickly, but then, I ran into the first hurdle: no graphical display. Nothing at all. In Windows XP, prior to installation of the custom drivers, I was getting a pathetic resolution, but I had a display. No dice here. Now, a typical Windows user might be clucking that it's the reason why they don't touch anything exotic like Linux. However, the problem is NOT really with Linux. It starts with the device manufacturer who feels that they need not make drivers for any operating system other than Windows. Does the Linux community just moan about it and saunter away ? No, they make their own drivers which almost always work just as well as the ones made by the original manufacturers!
Now, since I had both Windows and Linux on my machine (dual boot), I had to do a lot of switches: head to Windows, surf the net for driver related articles, download stuff, reboot into Linux and try getting things to work and repeating the process till it worked. I finally got the ATI driver going. Incidentally, the driver in this case WAS made for Linux by the manufacturers themselves, a nice development. Now, I had a graphical display. This meant that I could use my repository to happily customize my setup. Second stop, getting internet connectivity onto Linux or rather, getting Linux to be able to use my mobile connected with the data cable and use the GPRS. Now, Debian detected my mobile's modem straight away, so no problems on that front. I read up about a tool called wvdial, read up about the required settings and implemented them, and voila! I had internet! I later even managed to get the Reliance Netconnect thingy working on my desktop. Now, these USB internet thingies are tricky. On Windows, when they are first connected, they are detected by Windows as 'USB Storage Disks'. The driver files are actually stored within this disk and they are automatically executed. Upon setting up the drivers, the USB device 'switches' identity: it stops acting like a USB disk and now proclaims itself to be a USB modem and is from than point, always detected as a USB modem by Windows. Now, when these devices came into the market, there was no way to get this 'switching' of identities to work on Linux, but like everything in the Linux world, this was not for long. A component called usb_modeswitch, upon installing, succeeds in getting this very behavior in Linux, meaning, problem solved.
I next checked on the sound: it was working just fine. I just tweaked it to my preference using an opensource tool called alsamixer, which interacts with the actual soundcard.
I now have wonderful sound, a wonderful display, and perfect internet connectivity on my Debian box.
Now, I'm happy!
Oh, by the way, I got the results of my MCA fifth semester exams. I got an A!
