I now have a basically functioning (if not fully featured or configured) Debian system running the latest stable release, woody.
I congratulate myself.
I enjoyed the process from the start, actually. Jigdo is a thoroughly civilized way to download iso images, especially since I had a couple of almost 2-year-old woody CDs that only needed partial updates. For those who are unfamiliar with jigdo (short for jigsaw downloader
), it's a program which allows the downloading of huge files like isos in individual pieces, so that it places less stress on the server. In addition, those individual pieces can come from local sources as well! I just told the program to scan my CDs for component files, and it found most of them there. Only a few had updated versions.
The actual installation process was quite easy, as it generally is. Debian's detailed questions can sometimes be intimidating to newbies, but I found myself rather comfortable with answering them. I am perhaps somewhat less of a newbie than I myself might think, in spite of my nearly two-year enforced hiatus from Linux.
One of the advertised features of Debian is its package management system, and I've already had ample opportunity to appreciate it. I compiled about 3 kernels today (10 minutes each!), using Debian's kernel-package system according to this HOWTO. It's amazing! The whole grueling process is reduced to this:
$ make menuconfig
$ fakeroot make-kpkg clean
$ fakeroot make-kpkg --append-to-version=.20040526 kernel_image
That's it. When that's done, there will be a file in /usr/src called kernel-image-2.4.19.20040526[uglystuff].deb, and I just install that using dpkg. Isn't Debian supposed to be hard?
The greatest thing was that I didn't have to bang my head against the wall to get my nVidia graphics card working, either. A little Google search popped up another HOWTO that led me step by step through the process. I just installed three more Debian packages and recompiled my kernel, and it worked. Jeff didn't believe it would work, but I told him he should have more faith. :-)
Now the only problem is that the network doesn't come up under my new kernels, although it did just fine under the default. That's the next project to tackle. (The USB mouse is extra credit.)
Senji says:
Debian is hard. You have to be able to read the documentation....
Laurabelle says:
Reading is hard?
Hmm. Maybe this process would be more difficult if I thought I knew what I was doing. As it is, I read everything I can find.
Senji says:
Lots of people seem to expect that they can just click a few obvious buttons and everything will magically work.
This is possibly encouraged by distributions like RedHat and SuSE, where it is usually true (although, in my experience when it doesn't work you're in for a lot of hard work to figure out why; and fix it!).
Laurabelle says:
That was very much my experience with Mandrake. The first box I ran it on was a HP desktop, and everything worked out of the box except for the soundcard, which had a winmodem attached. For a while I didn't even notice the lack of sound, but then I solved the problem by installing a real soundcard instead.
When I bought Delilah (a Dell Inspiron 8100) and started installing Mandrake on her, I had a lot of trouble getting the correct Nvidia drivers compiled properly. I think the final process was:
Hmm. That brief list doesn't do justice to all the anguish and failures that I went through. I had found a couple of different sets of instructions, and neither one worked; I figured it out by recombining elements from each.
In comparison, getting Nvidia drivers installed on Debian was an absolute piece of cake (especially because the instructions I found worked). Perhaps it is precisely because I had so much trouble with Mandrake that I was expecting Debian to be more difficult. I had no expectation that the whole system would work out of the box; I expected to have a system that would boot and run, and that's about all. All the things I've fixed since installation (networking, video, sound, USB) were completely expected.
Eh, whatever. I fail to recognize RTFM as an optional skill.
ssta says:
I read this because Senji mentioned it as an example of a sensible user.
You aren't a user though, you're a sysadmin.
Sysadmin is a frame of mind rather than a job-title, if you have the frame of mind, you're a sysadmin... :)