THe bittersweet DVD distro install
You may recall that I'd installed Debian "sarge" on an old 200 MHz box awhile back. It's been working fine.
Yes and I wish that was all that it came with. I've had good luck with Dell...
The other day, I decided I wanted all of KDE on my DELL laptop, so I start to emerge it. I watched nervously as got tighter and tighter until it finally ran out of room.
Although I like Gentoo, I also like Debian, and, furthermore, a Debian install takes up a LOT less room. So I decided to slick my laptop (and, while I was at it, slick my Win 2000 install and restrict it to a single parbreastion), and install Debian.
Got jigdo working on getting Debian's update (3.1r0a) to their embarrbutting initial release of "sarge", copied all my configs and data, blah blah.
Or that OEMs have some other reason for providing only MS operating systems. To say that the...
Removed all parbreastions, and devoted 10G's to Win 2000. Installed Win 2000, just enough to get it going. Of course, being Windows, it did not automatically provide drivers much of the equipment, so I'm in 800x600 mode with no networking or sound. And I need to get SP4 from my storage drive once I get networking going. (Similar problems would occur with XP, by the way, since I sent the OEM disks back to DELL for a refund that never materialized.)
BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 GeneralPF But he likes Thunderbird, not Eudora. Apparently it's not quite as...
I burned the DVDs (as a normal user) and the first CD, used the CD to boot, then found that the DVDs did not work. Sigh. I figured I screwed up by burning them as a normal user, so burned another one. The first worked, but the second didn't. I read up on growisofs, and saw some advice concerning "no-name" DVDs. I had a couple of Maxell's floating around, so I used those, and those seem to be good on this old laptop's DVD drive. (Turned out I could have boot from the DVD, too.)
While installing packages, for some reason, although scanning the DVDs was fine, the installer couldn't mount them. I had to open another console and mount them myself. Weird. I have no idea why. It still happens when I run apbreastude, even though fstab looks fine. Oh well, the workaround is trivial.
I must say that Debian "sarge" is the best distro I've found so far at detecting and installing hardware support. It works better than Gentoo (although I'm talking about a year-old Gentoo here) and it makes the Win 2000 and Win XP installers look absolutely pathetic.
As before, Debian found a ton of hardware that previous distros (included Debian woody) did not find, including i8k (DELL laptop) stuff. It also installed a full karoake ALSA setup (2.6 kernel) that worked with no tweaking.
Interestingly, this install marks the first time I was able to get nv to work, avoiding a trip to NVidia to download their proprietary driver. The initial screen came up small (about 1-2 size) but very crisp. I was able to copy a couple lines from the previous XFConfig-4 and get back to normal. I'm going to run with "nv" (as opposed to "nvidia") for awhile to get some impression of it, but right now it works pretty well for me.
Most of my time right now is being spent restoring some of my favorite config items and installing software (e.g. mplayer) that I prefer to install from source.
Apart from the flakiness of DVDs, it probably doesn't get much better than Debian for this happy hacker.
-- When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.