Karsten M. Self wrote:
on Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 11:23:45PM +0100, Thorsten Haude (debian@thorstenhau.de) wrote:* . wrote (2004-02-17 23:17):What is the likelyhood that the hardware in these computers is 100% compatible with DebianVery high.Agreed.and all it takes is the regular Debian installation procedure ?Quite high.Thought that's not the only way to fly. A chroot install can give the benefits of a known good installation, and the use of that installation while you're getting Debian on the box.
I'd second this. Or if you're even more simple-minded (like me :) just create another smallish partition on the disk and install into that.
It's nice to be able to boot up into a working OS (SUSE in this case) in order to edit the parameters in the other, or to pick through its config files to find what version of something it's running or what setting for option x there is in config file y. The downside here is that SUSE and Debian frequently use different names for the same thing and different ways to achieve the same goal, so you need to RTFM all the time.
I'd also agree with the other comment that Debian stable is [way, IMHO] behind SUSE in hardware compatibility. Quite apart from its age, there's another reason for this. Some Debian folks think that hardware detection code that only runs on Intel platforms is not portable and therefore shouldn't be used in Debian. I have trouble getting my head round that but suffer the resulting pain regardless. I'd recommend installing Knoppix before trying a vanilla Debian install (it's only another small partition ...)
Cheers, Dave