Debian First Impressions

[LocoCoyote]

I mentioned before that I was playing around a bit with Debian (Woody). Wow! What a throwback to the bad old days. I haven't had this much trouble installing a OS since I was playing with RedHat 6.2 on a 386 laptop. Bad.
The problems all stem from the piss poor installation routines and stone age kernel. I caught living hell getting this thing to install on my Dell D800 laptop (Don't start with me, I have had everything from FreeBSD 4.8, Mandrake 10, Slackware (9 & 10), and Suse (8.2-9.3) on this thing without a hitch). Belive me when I say that Debian is NOT for newbies.
I didn't have much trouble getting a very basic install on the hard drive. Where I started running into trouble was with the apt configuration. No matter what I tried, apt could not recognize my CDROM or NIC. Had no problems with this during the initial install, mind you, just when I tried to configure apt. I wound up installing from my Suse partion with debootstrap and chrooting over to finish the darn thing. I am still having issues with X, but progres is being made.

In one sense this has been good. It never hurts to blow off the dust from those unused neural pathways and get back to the roots of how these things work. I have always said that Windows, Micro$oft, and GUIs have been making us dumber and dumber.

To be fair, however, I haven't yet tried this on anything other than my D800, so it might just be this particular model. Any how, I'll do a more formal review once I have had some time to play with it in depth.

[mikeL]

I hear ya loco, I attempted a debian install about a year ago, and that's all it turned out to be was an attempt. Then I went with Slackware 9.1 and stayed with that Slack ever since.

How true your statement is about Windows, I like to call the point and click OS. Because that's all the user has to do, especially when using W2K to the present window OS's. I had to install Win98 (fresh install) last week, and forgot just how many seperate sets of driver disks a person needs to complete the install.

Mike

[Karnevil9]

Phew!! I thought it was just me. I like the Debian based systems I've tried, Knoppix, Morphix, Libranet, to name a few, but I could never get Debian itself installed. You got it to install at least. I never could even get that far. Something always went wrong.