Recommendations

[George Kirkham]

Hi,

Can I help as a beta tester ?

Who am I ?  A (Windows based) computer professional who (supported by my 
wife who had me set up her PC to be Debian 3.1 R2 and non-Microsoft), is 
keen to see Debian become a true alternative to Windows for a PC OS. My 
house run 7 PC (3x P IV, 3x P III, one P I) and 4 humans (to adults, two 
children).

My current issues/requests/suggestions for Debian Linux (stable release) 
are;

1) I would recommend that to be useful for the Internet, Debian needs 
Iceweasel to support Video, sound, midi, flash (which it does). To get 
flash sound working I have had search the Internet for ideas and found 
this worked;
ln -s /usr/lib/libesd.so.0 /usr/lib/libesd.so.1
mkdir -p /tmp/.esd
touch /tmp/.esd/socket

There were suggestions of using mplayer but it is not yet in the stable 
release.

2) Printing is quite good with Brother's HL2040 drivers, but I had to 
hunt around the Internet for days to find that CUPS (if you want to 
connect to a printer on a Windows XP/Windows 200 PC) has a dependency on 
foomatic-bin and cupsysdriver-gimpprint. 

3) I sure like nVidia's screen drivers.

4) I would love to see Linux get on top of Graphics and support 3D video 
games (not that I play them, but the kids would like to).  Microsoft 
leaned to be taken seriously, they had to play games too.

5) I attempted to play a midi file but I have been unable to do this. I 
would like a standard install of Linux to set up sound (alsa, esd, oss, 
I don't care as long as it does all the sound requirements. gnome 
installs correctly, so why not sound?

6) I have a firewire card, but it was difficult to configure Linux to 
use this. I have give up on that one too, along with the WinFast TV 
turner card.  It is a pity that these things can be done, but the 
install cannot complete this and it is so hard to locate instructions 
that are clear enough for a non-Linux expert to manage.  (there are so 
many people with so many ways to do the task, but often they don't work 
for the specific and current release of Debian Linux that I am using.

7) I would like to do video editing and DVD creation over to Linux, but 
that took me into the realm of unstable packages so I never ventured there.


Maybe I don't have enough Debian Linux knowledge to help, not sure I 
could configure correctly ? I cannot even get Runescape sound to work in 
Firefox. (did manage to get Flash and Java going).

I would like to see Linux at the stage where the company I am supporting 
could seriously look at replacing Windows with it. I had request for a 
client member but the hurdle is so large at this time.

Now after all that negative points, my wife's PC is stable (unlike that 
other OS), is using two monitors, plays Runescape (without sound), 
youtube with sound, is our print server for the Brother Mono Laser 
printer, and Internet sharing/firewall for the family. I have VMWare 
Debian Linux and a P IV 1.7 GHz Debian for test and research.

Thanks,

George Kirkham.