Slashdot Mirror
The Very Verbose Debian 3.0 Installation Walkthrough
Gentu writes "Cited the general displeasure which accompanied the Debian 3.0 release, mostly regarding its dated installation procedure, Clinton De Young wrote an easy-reading but long article for OSNews going through the Debian installation step by step. Of course Progeny released recently the PGI graphical installer, but it is not as complete as the current Debian text-based installer and it will definately be quite some time before it get adopted by the project."
I found debian's own installation guide to be extensive enough
-dk
On my house mail server, that's a different story. I'm running Debian on an old P133. Debian made it really easy to install a totally stripped down system and exim configuration beats the *#@$* out of sendmail configuration as far as I'm concerned.
The debian install isn't bad at all if you're FAMILIAR with linux and know what you're doing. People complain it isn't as nice as Mandrake install. Guess what, Debian is put out by hobbyists and not by a commercial company. The focus is on functionality, NOT GUI interface design.
Debian isn't shooting for the average Joe Schmo linux desktop user. I think Debian is great for systems when you want TOTALLY cutting edge (unstable gets updated all the time and installing new packages over the net is a breeze), when you want just a few precisely chosen packages, or when running headless.
My largest complaint about Debian isn't about the installer per se, it's about X windows and fonts. Basically, I apt-get install gnome etc... and I have no idea what is up with the font situation. It use to be that you didn't even have truetype and had to fuck around for hours to get basic truetype working. I have no idea what the situation is with anti-aliasing and gnome 2.
But watch the criticism of Debian. Debian is a free product that is remarkably functional. It literally amazes me that anything in Debian works at all (and for the most part, everything does *with a lil tweakin*). Unless you start paying money for Debian GUI development, watch your tongue :P You're not ENTITLED to completely free operating system with a nice graphical installer!
This installer is modularised, using udebs (micro debs) to extend its functionality. Currently bootable on i386 and s390 but probably not usable to do a complete install yet.
The Progeny-developed discover tool, similar to Red Hat's kudzu, is being used for hardware autodetection by the installer. But the Progeny installer itself seems to be not very useful to create a fully-fledged installer - it does not even have support for non-ext2 filesystems!
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Finally, we just tried all the drivers, one by one, until the right one didn't fail on load.
This doesn't address the general issue, of course, but it's a very useful tidbit for your future information:
If you're trying to figure out what driver to use for a semi-unknown card, you can often get some really good hints by running "lspci". It just lists everything that the PCI bus reports on it. "lspci -v" gives a bit more information. I find that 99 times out of 100 I can just look at the information reported and narrow down the list of possible drivers to just two or three.
After that, of course, modprobing them one by one is the simplest way to figure out what's likely to work, but it's a lot easier with a smaller list.
Failing that, I've resorted in the past to writing a little 'for' loop in bash to just load every driver in the directory, then running 'lsmod' to see what managed to load. Something like:
...executed in the directory with all of the network modules is butt-ugly, has numerous problems... and very often works like a charm ;-)
Not newbie-friendly, though. But for me, like many I know who were around during the bad old days of Windows driver hell (Win95 to early Win98), I have a visceral fear of automagic hardware detection, and I would *much* rather just configure it myself, thank you. That way I know what is getting loaded, and when, and why.
Heck, I even tend to configure my kernels with everything as a module just so I can tell what drivers are being used and what aren't.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
It's impossible to mix+match packages.
Not anymore...
I run a mixed testing/unstable system this way, and it works for me.