[Cialug] Fragile sound support in Debian

[James Shoemaker]

Renegade Muskrat wrote:
> Thanks for the response. After sending my initial message in this thread 
> i found some newsgroup postings (i think to debian-users, though that 
> may be incorrect) about lots of people finding the same problem with the 
> most recent kernel upgrade to Sarge. It turns out that some patches were 
> applied to the kernel that causes its symbol table to change, which 
> broke lots of external modules. People were complaining most about alsa 
> and nvidia modules. Since it is a known bug (i think classified as 
> release-critical) it will probably be fixed soon. Once it is fixed, i 
> think i'll hold the kernel and alsa packages so this doesn't happen 
> again. When sound has been broken before it has usually been fixed 
> within a week or two, so i wouldn't expect to have to wait much longer. 
> If i do, then i may try building alsa manually. So far i've been 
> avoiding building anything manually because i don't want to subvert the 
> packaging system (i've done that before on several non-Debian systems 
> and eventually ran into problems; since i'm planning on keeping the 
> current installation for several years i don't want to do anything that 
> would cause problems later).

	With debian you can build packages from source, and install them 
without breaking the system.  There are source packages for most of the 
packages out there, you then build the appropriate .deb file and install 
it.  Not working around the package system, just inside it.  Though it 
won't work for newer versions, just ones incompatable with libraries and 
kernels.

James