[Now that I'm subscribed on d-u, I'm reposting this as I'd really like feedback that I can reply to - I might have made some bonehead remarks here :-)]
I've installed Debian. Rescue + root, plus the base2_2.tgz on a CD. Not once, but twice. On the laptop, and on the desktop machine - and I'm considering it for the HP9000, too. And you know what? I like it. A lot. However. All was not plain sailing. Here's what went wrong during the desktop install (installs of any OS on that particular box (Acer TravelMate 508DX) are just plain weird, so I didn't count any of that stuff :)) 1. XFree86 installation/configuration. This is just plain broke. After switching from stable to testing and "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade"-ing, I did "apt-get install x-window-system". Cool beans, all the packages did verily appear (have I mentioned that I love broadband?). Ran xf86config, answered all the questions. Run "startx". Error. No screens. WTF? Check /etc/X11/XF86Config. Have blinding flash of inspiration and swap this file with /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. Works. OK, it's WindowMaker, which I detest, but I can point, click and drool. No mouse. I can't point. Clicking and drooling lost its appeal fairly quickly :-) Symlinking /dev/mouse to /dev/psaux wouldn't hurt THAT much, would it? Networking configuration. Or the complete and utter absence thereof. For a distro that wants to install off the internet, not detecting, configuring and using an absolutely bog-standard 3Com 3C590 10MBit card is a bit heinous. I had to edit /etc/network/interfaces myself, and the card never did get its module loaded automatically and interface started until I had created a 2.4.18 kernel package. When this was installed, it all Just Worked. As I've pointed out to Karsten (and others) in the past, FreeBSD has this down pat - two floppies and you're away - in stark contrast to the 13-17 floppies you need for Debian, and networking config is a solved problem. OK, FreeBSD sucks rocks once it's installed, but you get the idea :) Sound? Well, I've got the best sound card that never ruled the world - the Aureal SonicVortex2, based on the AU8830 chipset. As Creative Labs bought Aureal to save their blushes (Aureal's A3D surround sound kicked Creative's EAX all over the shop, and Aureal had the misfortune to go bust at the wrong time) and promptly killed it, the drivers are in legal limbo. However, http://www.braincells.com/debian/sid/au88xx/ to the rescue! Apart from a totally horked genchanges.sh script (pgp shenanigans), this worked fine and didn't mean I had to step outside the packaging system to get this going. Slight problems - the module doesn't get loaded at boot time and /dev/mixer and /dev/dsp had 0660 permissions, which meant mere mortals couldn't access them. Other random thoughts: Some wrapper script to jiggle /etc/apt/sources.list to enable easy switching between testing and stable, and also mirror selection. ftp.uk.debian.org started going hella slow last night at about 8PM, and switching to ftp.de.debian.org fixed it - but I had to edit the file to make this happen. Hell, *I* might write this :) There needs to be apt tasks for GNOME and KDE. If there are, I can't see them. Not that I want to install KDE, mind, but a simple method of zapping it when I find it would be nice :) Aptitude and apt-utils should be part of the base install. Too useful not to have. Perl whined about locales (I use en_GB) until I ran the locale configurator thing - this should have been part of the post-first-boot config. xinetd should be the default rather than plain inetd. I scored a big win when I chose to use ext3 on my old Red Hat install rather than Reiser, as it meant the relatively vanilla 2.2.19 kernel on the floppies could happily read my existing partitions, and I had no "is the kernel actually going to mount /home?" moments. In the installer, I like the flexibility of being able to jump around and do different things. What I don't like is not being able to see a quick summary of what's been selected/done so far. Even if it just said "I'm gonna mount / on /dev/hda1, there's an active swap partition at /dev/hda2, and you haven't installed anything yet" that would be good. No help whatsoever in installing or configuring the grub bootloader. While grub is an uber-neato bit of software, it's a total bear to set up at first. I actually gave up and went back to LILO for the sake of convenience - I think I could have spent the entire evening just playing with grub. All in all, though, a rewarding experience. At the end of the evening I had a fully functional Linux system running GNOME, with Evo and Galeon in place and working. No user data was ever lost and my Windows partition (gotta play games, dontcha know) was unaffected. Regards Peter. -- Peter Whysall [EMAIL PROTECTED] The TLD in my email address is sdrawkcab.
