[NBLUG/talk] William's Debian install

[A'fish'ionado]

I put my name in the subject line to avoid confusing it with another
thread that's going on right now... ;-)

Lincoln gave me the Debian "testing" CD set at the last meeting, and I
just finished setting it up on my laptop. Knoppix and a short
experiment with Mandrake aside, this is the first distribution of
Linux besides SuSE that I've really played with.

So far, it has been a joy to work with. It's not for people
intimidated by the command line and ncurses, but if you aren't, it's
arguably easier to install than some of the commercial distros with
100% gui installers. :-)

The initial install process went just fine, although loading the index
files from each of the fifteen CDs was a pain. :-P I soon was able to
boot into--a command line. By running tasksel, though, I was soon able
to quickly get a complete GUI desktop up and running with Gnome and
KDE (apparently there's a selection that I missed to do this within
the initial install). I opted to manually enter the information for my
monitor, and right away manually set the resolution for X to 1024x768,
so I didn't have to deal with funny resolutions later (when I
installed SuSE I had some trouble getting it to 1024x768 resolution).
With the desktop running, with apt-get I was able to get fortune,
frozen-bubble, and xgalaga installed (all the important things!).

Then I started to run into trouble. gkrellm installed fine, but when I
launched it, the system completely froze. I couldn't even use
ctrl+alt+F1 to get to the console. Then I found out that KDE did the
same thing when it got to "initializing peripherals"--the system
completely froze and didn't respond to anything short of a cold, hard,
reboot.

Just for the heck of it, even though I didn't really think it would do
anything, I decided to try installing the 2.6 kernel. I fired up
aptitude and quickly found and installed the new kernel. The Debian
packaging system is an absolute joy to work with, BTW. :-) I fired up
vi to add the new entry to grub.lst--and found that apt-get had
already added it for me!

I rebooted with the 2.6 kernel--and gkrellm and KDE worked perfectly.
The music in frozen-bubble had been stuttering a bit--even that
cleared up with the 2.6 kernel! Woohoo! :-)

Right now I'm working on getting Enlightenment, and maybe Fluxbox
working (this computer only has 256 megs of memory). I think I have
Enlightenment installed, but I cannot figure out how to add it to the
list of sessions in GDM. (Part of me is tempted to switch back to KDM
just because I already know how to configure it, while the GDM online
documentation is being decidedly unhelpful.)

BTW, this is the same laptop that was giving me the random lock-ups
recently. I'm still procrastinating on calling tech support. The last
few days, though, it hasn't done that to me at all--I don't know if
it's just playing with me or what. The CD-ROM drive has been making
funny noises with the Debian CDs, though. I don't know if the drive is
dying of it has to do with the funny file structure on the Debian CDs
(words of warning--Windows XP completely panics when you insert one of
the Debian CDs).

Anyway, I just wanted to shout out "Yay, it's WORKING!" to everybody.
:-) At this point, I am thrilled with what I've seen so far.

William

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