SATA newbie questions

[Daniel Pittman]

Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu> writes:
> Kevin Kempter wrote:

>>> One issue with running Fedora on my laptop was that I had
>>> performance issues with my SATA hard drive. The fix was to add this
>>> to the grub kernel line: "combined_mode=libata"
>>>
>>> However doing this causes issues with mounting my cd's / dvd's and
>>> automount stopped working completely.
>>
>> Is this an issue with Kubuntu as well?
>
> Depends on what SATA driver you have.  You'll probably have to try it.

The answer is: the more recent your system the less a problem.  You
should be able to use Edgy or (in a month) Feisty on that system without
the command line argument and without any problems.

I am not certain about Dapper but I believe it doesn't have support for
ATAPI devices in the kernel.  I don't have the relevant hardware to be
certain, sorry.

>> Also, two more questions: (1) can someone point me to a link with
>> info on how to install debian packages by hand ?
>
> dpkg -i 

... but you probably shouldn't be doing so at all.  

I know that on most RPM based distributions grabbing and installing a
random RPM from the Internet is pretty common.  Under Debian and Ubuntu
that isn't really the case.

When you find a third party who you really /need/ packages installed
from -- and that shouldn't happen often -- they generally publish a
repository that works with apt.

So, to do this you normally add the appropriate entries to
/etc/apt/sources.list (through your GUI of choice, or by hand) and then
install the package just like every other.

>> (2) can I search on what packages/versions are currently installed
>> (like an rpm -qa) ?
>
> To show all installed packages:
>
> dpkg -l
>
> If you want to search for particular installed package names, try e.g.:
>
> dpkg -l | grep xserver*

...or, more efficiently, as 'dpkg -l xserver*'

Er, quoted if you had any files in the current directory starting with
'xserver' -- passing a glob to dpkg -l is matched as you would expect.

See also the manual page for details on how to get a format other than
the default for the package list.

> There should be a better way to do this, but if so I don't know it.
>
> Other than that, it depends what you want to do.

Nope.  Well, not really, anyway.  There might be a better solution to
the problem that you /think/ the equivalent of 'rpm -qa' is the solution
to, but not to the core "list packages" task.

Regards,
        Daniel
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