shayney wrote:@ yarrgh
Plymouth (or any splash) is not part of the debian edition at this stage, I believe this is due to clem not being happy with it's problems.
However, I did try installing plymouth myself and it ran fine (on intel hardware).
@nadir
The link you posted regarding my sound card does work, to an extent.
I have tried that method before and certain things work (laptop speakers) and others don't (hdmi output when connected to external TV amongst others, headphone output very crackly).
I could probably work out those issues but it is going against my ultimate aim of an out-of-the-box dekstop without any compiling or adding of repos.
From further reading it seems all my sound issues should be solved in kernels 2.6.33 and upwards which testing doesn't have yet.
I am not good with sound stuff.
But in case a higher kernel solves your problem you got two choices:
The one is to make use of the experimental kernel from the experimental repos. As far only the kernel is concerned that shouldn't give you trouble (and you still got your testing kernel, so you won't bork the system).
If you add experimental to the sources and run apt-get update you will have to install it with that syntax:
apt-get install -t experimental linux-image-name_one_the_35_kernel.
If you add for unstable/sid it is different. You will need to edit the /etc/apt/preferences file, so testing is being set to the default repo (but for experimental it is: it only installs from experimental in case you tell it to).
Don't install other things from experimental. That is not a good idea
(even when running unstable or mixed testing/unstable one should first read a bit about how one does that in a proper way).
The other choice is to install the liquorix-kernel. It works very well.
http://liquorix.net/
Lots of people who are running Debian testing or unstable use it, and i have not heard of any problems yet.
As it is tweaked for being run on a desktop (while the stock debian kernel is rather for a server), that is the better option.
Imo, of course.
Hope this helped.