Choosing a Debian Variant
This is a message I /should/ have sent before I even tried
to install Debian. Oh well, better late than never.
Here's the deal: I want Debian on my machine. Mandrake is
in many ways wonderful; it has the best install in the
world (in my experience); it has loads of bundled software;
and it does a great job of detecting and configuring
existing hardware. However, it's a toy OS. Administration
can be confusing and goofy; there's rarely a canonical
Mandrake Way to do common tasks like there is a Debian Way;
upgrading is a joke; and besides, it has no Policy. After
doing a lot of reading, I've come to the conclusion that
Debian is the most technically superior distro out there.
So, I want Debian, and I'm determined to install it.
However, there are some requirements I have. There are
certain things I want on my new Debian system, and I don't
want to dick around with configuring them after the
install, or waiting hours or days for large packages to
download over my measly 56k connection.
Here's what I want out-of-box:
ReiserFS: I've had great experiences with this on Mandrake.
It's fast, and when the power goes out unexpectedly I
needn't worry about disk integrity. I want to be able to
format my boot/system partition with ReiserFS during the
install.
KDE 2.2(Preferred)/KDE 2.1(Acceptable): I use both KDE and
GNOME apps, and I don't want to wait hours to upgrade to a
recent KDE.
GNOME 1.4(preferred)/GNOME 1.2(acceptable): See above.
XFree86 4.*: Must include drivers for an NVIDIA RIVA TNT2
Kernel 2.4.*
Nice-To-Haves:
GRUB as the default bootloader: I like GRUB. It's less
finicky than LILO.
The other things I want in a Debian variant:
A good installer. Not necessarily a super-easy one; but
one that people have found is solid and doesn't do anything
nonsensical (like overwrite your MBR after asking a single,
non-obvious question *cough*Progeny*cough*). Also one that
either a) auto-detects hardware *WELL*, or b) prompts the
user for hardware info. Not one that does a half-assed job
of hardware detection, and leaves the system
half-configured.
I want it to be very Debian-Compatible. By which I mean, I
want to be able to grab packages from standard Debian
"testing" or "unstable", and have them install without
conflicts. Basicly I don't want a lot of unnecessary
proprietary tweaks.
So, there are my requirements. What I'm trying to figure
out is, which Debian Variant to install. I've already tried
Progeny, and found it lacking in many respects. What I'm
asking is, should I go with Libranet? Or should I chance
using Stormix, even though they are out of business? Or is
Progeny really my best bet, and I should stick with it? Or
should I just tough it out and get an Official Debian CD,
and suffer through hours of package downloads? Is there
any Debian-based distro I'm missing? (I have no interest in
Corel, that's why it's not listed)
Thanks for your time,
-Avdi Grimm
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