[argyllcms] Linux test system


I've been setting up a test box to be able to test and debug
Argyll running on various operating systems, especially Linux.

While many of the distributions have been relatively straightforward
to get installed (the issue causing most problems being that
some of the distributions don't seem to be able to handle more
than 15 partitions on an IDE driver), a number of distributions
have defeated me.

Successes:

        Ubuntu 7.10
        Fedora Core8
        WhiteBox 4.2
        Madriva 2008.0
        OpenSUSE 10.3

   including 64 bit versions, Gnome and KDE versions.

Failures:

        Debian 4.0 "Etch"
        Gentoo 2007.0
        CentOS 5.1

CentOS seemed to trip over the SATA DVD drive
and ended in a kernel panic. I gave up on that and loaded
the WhiteBox version I'm currently using instead.
(It's likely to be very similar to Fedora I imagine anyway.)

After spending longer on them than all the other
distributions combined, neither Debian nor Gentoo would install.
Gentoo's configuration was too hard to fathom, with too
little guidance or examples for a casual user, and even after working
around various bad iso images, and wasting hours downloading
archives over my 512K internet connection, it all ended with
an obscure option error during compilation (unknown option
"--no-gensplash").

After countless attempts to load Debian, working around
it's problems with SATA Hard Drives and DVD drives,
the installs were never a success, hanging on
accessing the root file system after install, or resulting in
a partial install, missing various essential elements,
and always reporting failures to install software components
due to "failed Automatic printer Configuration".

So until these distributions get to a state where a
casual user (such as myself) is able to install them
on currently available hardware (ASUS P5K-V intel
motherboard so I can test intel, NVIDIA and ATI graphics
cards, a SATA hard drive and DVD drives) without spending
a week or more doing it, I'm afraid I won't be in a position
to figure out the system specific install issues or
bugs in running Argyll on these distributions :-(
Whether this is of much importance, I'm unable to guess.

Graeme Gill.

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