On 29/04/2008, Igor <k.igor.k@gmail.com> wrote:
Howdy, Jordi!
Igor, is that you? If so, you changed your Gmail address.
The laptop is XPS M1330.
Ah, nice. If I had waited a while, a couple of months, I could have
bought one of the same ones. Oh, well. I'm happy enough with the one I
have.
That's why I'd prefer not to do a clean wipe.
One of the biggest reasons I did a clean wipe was that I wanted to
encrypt the hard drive and felt morally insulted by that Dell rescue
partition that's designed to wipe your hard drive and reinstall
Ubuntu. How very Windows.
I've already changed the apt sources list to point to Debian
repositories. So far, none of the extra packages that I installed have
complained. But, I have yet to do a dist-upgrade, so I don't know if
that will introduce any problems (one step at a time :-).
I would be very surprised if dist-upgrading (or full-upgrade, as
aptitude now calls it) would work seamlessly. Heck, nowadays it
usually doesn't even work between Ubuntu releases for which it's
supposed to work, why would it work for going from Ubuntu to Debian?
I just noticed an unfortunate circumstance, though. Dell installed a
32-bit OS on my 64-bit machine. In my opinion, that is a rather dumb
thing to do.
Yeah, they did it to me too. I guess the only reason to run a 64bit
environment is for heavy number crunching which most users don't care
about, plus, 64bits would mean that Dell would have to do some
additional juggling to get stuff like Adobe's non-free player working.
Does Ubuntu have nspluginwrapper?
It also means that I might have to also figure out a way
to migrate to a 64-bit environment.
The only issue I had when installing 64bit Debian was with running
Adobe's flash player. But yeah, if you want 64bits, you're gonna have
to do a clean install. You can't dist-upgrade to a different
architecture (at least, not without more trouble than it's worth).
- Jordi G. H.