haytham’s blog

So…you got a new external USB CD-RW / DVD-RW and you don’t know how to run it on Debian GNU/Linux? no problemo amigo!

thing is, the Linux kernel emulates all USB devices as SCSI devices so you really have to know what kernel drivers you choose while compiling your kernel. Normaly to run a USB CD-RW/DVD-RW you need the following drivers to be compiled with the kernel:

- SCSI emulation support
- IDE/ATAPI CDROM support
- SCSI disk support
- SCSI CDROM support
- SCSI generic support
- USB device filesystem
- EHCI HCD (USB2.0) support
- USB Mass Storage support

of course, its your choice to compile log support for SCSI or USB, after compiling and modprobing the modules chosen (you can do that using modconf), get the following packages from apt:

apt-get install cdrdao cdrecord usbmount usbutils dvd+rw-tools

Of course, if you download k3b (KDE’s CD/DVD burner) for example, it will automaticaly download some other necessary packages.

that’s it, you should now be able to burn on your new external USB CD-RW/DVD-RW

Filed by haytham at 5:12 pm under Linux HOWTOs / Tutorials
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So you’re in your fresh Debian sarge (stable) installation and you want to upgrade to testing or unstable and the first thing you try to do is to [code] apt-get dist-upgrade [/code] but you’re shocked to see an error message that says:

E: This installation run will require temporarily removing
the essential package perl-base due to a Conflicts/Pre-Depends
loop. This is often bad, but if you really want to do it,
activate the APT::Force-LoopBreak option.

So the first step to fix that is to upgrade the following packages: e2fslibs, e2fsprogs, libc6 and finally libc6-dev. To do that, you need to insert a special option in apt that will allow you to by pass the Force-LoopBreak issue by issuing the following command:

apt-get -o apt::force-loopbreak=true install e2fslibs e2fsprogs libc6 libc6-dev

once this is done, you can go on by issuing apt-get dist-upgrade

enjoy !

Filed by haytham at 4:37 pm under Linux HOWTOs / Tutorials
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