sharealike.org

Some may recall that I recently installed SuSE 8.2 on my laptop. I finally decided that I had wireless networking so screwed up on there that I would have to do a fresh install of SuSE 8.2 to get it working. But before doing that, I’ve been wanting to try the latest official Debian release, code-named Woody.

Well, actually that’s not accurate. I wanted to try the more bleeding edge version called Sarge, and so at first I downloaded 10 CD-Roms worth of Sarge only to learn that the Sarge installer is seriously broken. Don’t bother with that just yet.

But boy was I amazed at the installer on Disc 1 of Debian 3.0r1! It worked perfectly, and before I knew it I had booted into KDE. Granted, I had to know a little bit about partitioning hard drives and find out that my laptop’s graphics card is by Neomagic, but all-in-all, WOW. A year ago I tried to install 2.2r5 Potato and it was nightmarish. The Debian folks have made major improvements.

The coolest thing was that when I got into KDE it still had not configured my PCMCIA ethernet card, but I read that I could user etherconf to configure it, and just did: apt-get install etherconf and in no time the card had received an IP address via DHCP. Wow.

The apt package system is working wonders for me elsewhere too. I’ve managed to apt-get gaim, openoffice.org 1.0.3, and did all the security upgrades seamlessly. I am now working on the java and flash plugins for mozilla. This thing will be a free-software running blaze of glory shortly! There’s still the wireless card issue to tackle, but I want to get everything else working first.

If you have no idea what Debian is, then you are missing out. Go to debian.org and start learning. It may actually not be the best GNU/Linux distriubtion for first-timers, but once you take back control of your computer, I get the feeling that Debian might be one’s last, because so far, it is sweet.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2003 at 11:51 am and is filed under GNU/Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.