[NBLUG/talk] The Debian Way

[Walter Hansen]

I'm now starting to get used to the debian world a little bit. I love the
apt-get. It's a little hard to figure out what to get, but I love it. Also
the desktop takes some getting used to, but I've never used it much
anyway, so that's probably mostly me(KDE).

I do want to know what sort of mechanism is commonly used for starting and
stopping services and setting them up for run level. I'm used to the
RedHat/Mandrake 'service xxxxx start' and 'chckconfig xxxxx'. Are there
similar tools under Debian (shell/desktop)? Should I install tools I'm
used to or is it better to learn the Debian way?

I've even learned vi recently (finally) because one of my new servers
running mandrake didn't come with pico and installing it proved to have
more dependencies than anything I'd previously encountered. So I learned
it kicking and screaming because it was simpler to learn than install
something better.

I can learn new things. I think debian is a excellent way to go, but the
install sucks. And then there's configuring the desktop for various
settings. I seem to have to learn how to do that every time I do it and
hope I don't blow up the monitor.

Yes, yes, I should RTFM, but there are people here who want to share their
knowledge and I'm not too annoying.