Working Workarounds
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Old Sound Cards
The driver package for old sound cards does not autodetect cards.
The driver package can be installed with:
apt-get install kernel-drivers-sound-isa kernel-sound-oss
but it won't immediately work because the developers decided not to implement probing for ISA cards (a complicated process that isn't needed by most users anymore - virtually everything is PCI or USB these days). Also, it has to be done by command-prompt, Kynaptic won't install them for some reason. Anyhow:
If you know or find out the module name for your sound card, there is an easy workaround. A great many of them, definitely including the ESS AudioDrives, are in the 'sb' module, which stands for SoundBlaster. For any of these cards, you can add:
modprobe --force sb
to your /etc/rc.local . Then you can go into your KDE Control Center and start up the sound system, in OSS mode.
If you have a non-sb ISA soundcard, you may want to try running alsaconf.
Older AMD Duron/Athlon (K7) CPUs
If you have an older AMD Duron or Athlon (K7) CPU, it might not have SSE, just 3DNow; and there is a detection issue. Specifying 'i586' (that's i586 without quotes) at the boot: prompt before the installer will fix this.
X Configuration
Right now, X configuration may have to changed manually. For newer monitors, the existing tools will work automatically and very well; to do your changing, just go to the KDE control panel, Peripherals section, Display area. For older ones, it will often work, but not always.
Configurators don't exist very much. According to [the X.org web site], there are two special configurators included in the X.org distribution, xorgcfg and xorgconfig. However, neither of these are available at this time in Ark. There is a configurator which can be retrieved in packaging, kxconfig, but this does not work.
There is only a partial workaround. SUSE 9.3 has xorgcfg which will run in -textmode, and SUSE 10.2 has text-only xorgconfig which runs fine. You can download this working xorgconfig binary here. But the problem is, neither helps very much: to use either, one must have the vertical and horizontal scan numbers for the monitor in question.
So there is not much of an easy way out for this one, unless the old (1998-era) Windows default scan numbers can be identified. Those should work as a good default. Otherwise, we have to hunt through the huge list of old monitors and scan numbers, for each monitor. Perhaps that list can be posted here in the future.
If you accidentally hose your X configuration, do Control-Alt-F1 to get a text-mode login prompt, log in as root or arklinux or other privileged user, and run '/usr/sbin/xrescue'.
gftp-text and/or libreadline.so.4
If you try gftp-text binaries in a vanilla install of Ark, you will see the following:
[arklinux@localhost ~]$ gftp-text gftp-text: error while loading shared libraries: libreadline.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory [arklinux@localhost ~]$
The cause is:
The gftp guys linked their binaries against an outdated version of the readline library. Ark Linux includes the current version.
The real fix is:
Get the source and recompile it on Ark Linux or another distribution that uses current libraries - or use a different ftp client.
A workaround is:
[arklinux@localhost ~]$ su - Password: [root@localhost arklinux]# cd /usr/lib [root@localhost lib]# ln -s libreadline.so.5 libreadline.so.4 [root@localhost lib]#
This workaround is permanent; the problem should not come back, unless truly weird things are done additionally :)
It is generally wrong to symlink *.so.X to *.so.Y because people change their sonames for a reason: *.so.X and *.so.Y are generally not binary compatible, so applications should always be rebuilt after "soname upgrade". In the case of libreadline.so.4 to libreadline.so.5, the binary interface has changed only for some not very commonly used functions, so this workaround will actually work for most applications.
Some Video Cards Don't Work With The Default Video Driver
If the X server (which provides the graphical user interface) fails to start up, chances are there's a problem with the driver for your graphics chip.
You can fall back to a generic driver that works for almost all cards (but is rather slow, since it can't make use of hardware specific optimizations) by editing the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
In that file, locate a line saying Section "Screen".
A couple of lines below that, you'll find a line saying Device "something". Change that line to read Device "Generic VESA SVGA".
Save the file. You should now be able to get into the graphical user interface.
