Saturday, December 29, 2012

Linux - Consequences on giving up the 386

Well, the disk drive on my main machine was constantly flaking out with io errors.  So I got myself a brand new solid state disk for Christmas.  Man that's fast!  But they are expensive, so I only got a 128 gb drive for the main Linux system.  General storage is still on old mag disks.

But, installing a new system ran right in to the current trend of abandoning the 386 (32 bits).  My Xerox 6125N only has a rotten old driver written in 2008, which needs 32 bits.  My new system has Debian Sid which has abandoned it.  It took half a day to figure this all out.

I upgraded http://ontario-geofish.blogspot.ca/2010/10/linux-xerox-6125n-laser-printer.html

Basically you must run 'dpkg --add-architecture i386

then 'aptitude update'

then 'aptitude install ia32-libs-i386'  which is huge

Finally 'aptitude install ia32-libs'  and then run the device driver line.


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