[SGVLUG] Needing Home Asistance re-installing Debian, here in Sherman Oaks

[Jeff Carlson via SGVLUG]

Hi all,

I feel that Chime's email deserves a bit of explanation.  I am one of
the people who has helped him with his computers in the past but his
current needs exceed my alotment of spare time.

I built the second computer which he spoke of.  Think of it as a NAS
running Debian.  It has software RAID with LVM on top of it.  Most of
the space in the volume group is unallocated -- I did that just to
allow flexibility with future decisions.  Suffice it to say there's
plenty of space to back up his primary machine onto it.

The main reason I don't have time to work on his machine is that he
has four sound cards and I don't know enough about them nor have the
time to learn all about configuring them to work the way they used to.
The second reason is the previously mentioned DecTalk.  Most people
have likely never heard of such a device, but suffice it to say it's a
hardware text-to-speach adapter.  There is Linux support, it does
require a driver which I think is open source but not in the mainline
kernel tree.  I'm not positive it can be compiled as 64-bit.  I did
not compile the last kernel he's using.  And the person who did
deleted the .config and the source tree so we have no trail to follow.

So that main computer is a somewhat older but 64-bit PC, running
Debian and I forget which version.  The apt/deb database is completely
corrupted and unusable to the best of my knowlege and the compiler is
hosed but I forget what the problem is.  Basically there's no way to
get new software onto the machine.  The current installation is 32-bit
and that's why I wonder if the DecTalk drivers will work with a 64-bit
installation.

The machine needs to be backed up and re-installed from scratch.
There are plenty of software components that don't work.  Someone
needs to come in and reconfigure his multiple sound cards so they can
work together again.  I can help out with the backup and the second
machine if I'm needed but I don't have time to learn all about sound
cards right now.  Also, the primary machine doesn't have NFS client
drivers, nor CIFS or FUSE, so moving files around is a bit of a
challenge and the reason I left a thumb drive with Debian Live plugged
in the back of the box.  If you boot the thumb drive at least then you
can use apt to install Btrfs drivers and whatever else you need to
work with the machine, but then you lose speach and DecTalk.

It has been more than six months since I have been over there, so I
forget some details.  Grub was screwed up but I think I fixed that as
best as I could.  There was some issue where the DHCP client was
actually grabbing every lease available but never bringing the NIC
up.  I found a fix for that by restoring some file from a Btrfs
snapshot, but I had to clear all the snapshots after that because they
were consuming 100% of his disks, and thus the reason we built the
other machine to be like a NAS ... and then discover there were no
remote file system drivers and no way to add them.  Do I make the
picture clear?

Alright, we need someone who knows some stuff about sound cards from
the command line, someone comfortable with compiling a new kernel
module for a piece of hardware originally introduced to the consumer
market in 1984 (but has remained the state-of-the-art in the field
ever since), and someone willing to make the trek over to Sherman
Oaks.  If you know a lot about Debian, maybe how to re-build the
apt/deb database, that's great, too.

Thanks,
Jeff

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