I finally got my new machine and armed with the advice of many people on this list, I aimed to install stable and upgrade to testing. The follow is my feedback:
* I installed the base from a Windows 2000 partition which worked fine. The install kernel kept locking up on boot and it turns out I needed the idepci kernel. The problem now was that although it didn't lock up, it wouldn't recognize my notebook's Intel PRO/100 (builtin ethernet). Apparently in the 2.4 kernel, the eepro100 driver works with this card, but the install kernel couldn't find it. Long story, but many hours later I finally got a functional kernel on the machine via Windows. Ironically, I booted a Mandrake 2.4 kernel I had on another machine to bootstrap Debian...Once I had network access I could install a kernel-image deb file, etc. Bottom line is that I got the machine functional (not fully installed yet) in about a half-day. BUT, I doubt there is any way a beginner could have pulled it off, IMHO. I was moving modules and kernels around, using multiple machines, multiple boot disks, etc. until it clicked. That's just to get the most minimal stable running. (The Debian claim is that stable is so stable because it works and doesn't really ever change. Problem with that is that the hardware changes underneath it and outdates--makes it UNstable anyway.) * That being said, apt-get is so much better than rpm. My dist-upgrade to testing had no problems. With minimal script updates, my new kernel + grub are working just fine. The new flexiblity is a real win. * QUESTION: The new notebook (A30p) has a Radeon Mobility card that happens to only be supported in the CVS version of XFree86 (4.1.99.1) from this month. So I have to compile this ultra-bleeding edge X server, which is fine, but... How do I make the Debian packaging system think that I have the xserver-* packages installed. I want to be able to apt-get galeon for instance but not have it try to pull down those packages and install an X-server. Can I insert a dummy entry/package into some DB? Thanks. Michael
