Uwe Dippel wrote:
On the other hand, for a seasoned user after three days too many items are unresolved: The original ATI Rage 128 never made it to start, the Ensoniq 5880 problem remains unresolved, galeon doesn't use the proxy settings; of course I could fiddle with XFConfig to get the TrueTypeFonts recognised (all documented in this group). For a very standard hardware these are too many. Especially, since another distro doesn't find any problems with these. I simply underestimated the amount of problems encountered for a very standard 3.0r1 / bf24 out of the box on average hardware.
I've found that I tend to have less success with 3.0r1 than I do with Sid (Unstable) when setting up new boxes. I start with Stable to get a minimal install on the box, then change my /etc/apt/sources.list to pull from Unstable and do a dist-upgrade, and upgrade my kernel to a 2.4 version, and find that I have a lot more success with getting hardware recognized and other things set up. And as others will testify, Debian's Unstable tends to be quite stable for desktop use (not for server 24x7 uptime use). Before giving up, you might want to give Unstable a shot.
-- Kent