grml rules

If the title doesn't tell you anything, you'll be a lot wiser after reading this :)

So I bought this new Vaio laptop.After checking that the really nice Vaio recovery tool does indeed leave any main operating system intact when restoring the pre-installed entertainment system, I was about to install the usual Debian/SID onto it.

However, I decided to install grml instead. The LiveCD already showed that it would support most of the hardware through autodetection, so after a few minutes of waiting for grml2hd and installing the <a href=http://"www.kde.org/">important things through Debian's unstable repositories, I had a working machine.

Or so I thought.

The sky2 driver necessary for the Marvell Yukon ethernet device stops working after some seconds of high traffic, I have to reduce the bandwidth using tc (thanks go to Kurt Pfeifle for mentioning this terrific tool).

Some issues came from grml or rather my choice to use it as a desktop system, for example it installs dbus by default, but does not start it through the runlevel mechanism. However, grml has an nvidia package suitable for their kernel, so I had hardware accelerated 3D out of the box. Warning: playing Wingcommander Privateer Remake kills your time faster than you can kill Pirates or Kilrathis :)

Yesterday I installed grml's 2.6.17 kernel packages, including an updated nvidia package and, after reboot, found that Mika has added ipw3945 support to their kernel, as well as packaged the additional userspace daemon and firmware.

Therefore I declare Mika my personal laptop experience super hero!