Re: Debian instalation
Hehe, I know the feeling :) Started with Slackware,
went to RH, tried Suse, Mandrake and Gentoo (later)
sometimes along the way, and have stayed with RH
consistently since 5.2.
Kent gave an intro already to upgrade your system,
you just have to specify in the apt source list which
one you want. I haven't played with mixed installation
(stable + testing + sid) yet.
I don't like old desktops, so I upgrade my computers
to sid. After using it for a month on my laptop and
on two test servers (no GUI though), it seems
good enough so I put them in real production use.
Ok, small office, with a few servers and
firewall/gateway
only.
If you are new to debian but know linux well, don't
bother with the debian directly. Get Knoppix or
Mepis installed on your machine first, and upgrade
later. Will save you tons of time and frustration.
I think your connection (128K) should be good enough
to do the upgrade, if you can find a mirror that can
give consistent download.
The only thing I don't like is, even with sid, a lot
of
the packages are still old compared to other distros
(Mandrake always has the most recent). And a few
of them just don't work (e.g. mrproject,
fwbuilder,...).
I'll maintain some nightly/weekly build when I learn
how to do my own deb packaging.
And i18n/l10n is not as good either. I still can't get
it to display Chinese in my gnome-terminal despite
that I have made all the necessary config/fonts and
installed
and loaded the right nls packages of the filesystem.
Applications can display/input Chinese just fine, the
filesystem can't. RH and Mandrake just have the best
support on this.
Oh, and don't get me go into the installer. It just
plain
sucks (Yeah, shoot me, I said it!). For god sake, we
are almost passed half of the first decaded of the 21
century, and we still can't have a good installer that
recognizes the hardware properly. For my server, I
didn't dare to buy any new hardware, only those that
are at least 2 years old, and it still can't get it.
E.g.
DLink DFE-530TX, PT-Link cards, and some old
ATI cards. I can pop Knoppix and Mepis in, and they
just works fine. Same for RH, Mandrake and Suse.
The package management is cool and fine, but if you
can't get pass the installation, you can't use it.
All my installations start with Knoppix, and then back
to
the debian upgrade.
But Knoppix and Mepis have very primitive installer,
you
can't really specify your way of partitioning the
disk.
You have to partition your disk, format your
filesystem,
after installing knoppix, copy the files/directories
to
the partition you want, and make changes to your
fstab, etc.... And Knoppix/Mepis only come with KDE
and I prefer Gnome, while gnoppix is not ready yet,
have to do about 300MB of install from apt-get to get
my desktop to the way I like it (almost...) after
spending
all these times downloading the Knoppix/Mepis and
debian ISO already :(
Someone please make a good installer (something is
going on here, but not ready yet), and start some
kind of donation campaign, a la Mandrake Club or
something. I'll put my money where my mouth is.
I currently already have 3 machines running debian
in production, and I'll pay for a good installer for
my future installation. Actually, we are evaluating
the
distros for a client with a 50-server installation in
a
data center. They gave the hardware specs, and I'm
really concerned about the debian installation
process.
I have always paid for my RH and Mandrake, retail
box version though, to encourage them to make
good desktop and encourage the stores to carry them.
Sorry, long rant. I like the package mgmt though, on
the condition that you can get it up and running
first.
kk
--- "Mihai P. B. Stiucan" <mihai@mycarenet.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am an RedHat user and now I saw that RedHat is no
> more available as a
> ...
> I need some advices, really.
>
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