Hello, I tough of posting my Linux experience as a complete Linux & Unix newbie that chose Debian to start playing with linux. (out of laziness and pure ignorance - I wanted to do a net install instead of waiting for entire cds iso to download and had no clue that Debian was an "hard distro")
First the installers: tried the new one and the old one. My first try: sarge & new installer The new one is real simple to use but it scared the hell out of me: after installing x the only thing my sceen could display was: "warning sync error will shut down in 5 sec" But, after rebooting, magic, tadam!, I was welcomed by KDM! still didn't figure out what happened. I managed to got everything net installed by configuring pppoeconf right at the very beginning (and played for the first time with apt, wget and lynx). After choosing a rather random selection containing gnome and KDE with taskel, I never managed to get my dsl connection to work again (yes I was loggin as root, rebooted etc...)!!! After intense googling with my powerbook (I was installing linux on an old Aptiva desktop) I found some bug report on debian mentionning a somehow similar problem with the new installer and needing hacking in many .conf files that seemed obsolete... And went through too many cryptic howtos. I almost quit linux at that point... I had enough! Untill I found an excellent document in French: "Formation Linux" (this NEEDS translation) http://www.via.ecp.fr/~alexis/formation-linux/. That was way more detailed on how to install Woody and get some real things done (Play cds, burn, configure and optimize X etc...) I still haven't found any document matching it in english. That is what is missing from Debian. An interest in producing documentation aimed at getting things done and not about knowing all the possible ways to configure everything. Also the too many "use your brain to solve your problems" answers to newbies post I ran accross surfing many newsgroups are inacceptable, if Debian is to become anything more than a geek toy. Anyway, I decided to give Linux (for me at that point Linux and Debian were synonyms) a second chance following carefully every steps from "Formation linux." Installing Woody the old way: Actually I found installing the old way was simpler because now I had proper documentation and new what I was doing. I managed to get everything (almost) to work the way I wanted. After a week of Woody I easily upgraded to Sid. (following again the clear instructions from "formation Linux") I can now use my usb wheel mouse, print to my usb printer, surf web, play movies, rip mp3, get e-mail, burn cds, process my tex documents with Kile, run open office, run Matlab (I own the full product copy - but now consider mooving to python numeric) etc... Life is good!!!. Sincere thanks to the Debian community. Problems I still have to solve: Get pon dsl-provider to work for users: (still have to login has root everytime) and continue it to work evenafter I unplugged the ethernet cable for more than 5 minutes... Networking: After too many tries with samba SWAT to communicate with my osX powerbook, I gave netatalk a try. I didn't work untill until I ran classic on top of X and access the good old chooser from the mac side. Still don't understand this trick. I have connected many samba macs osX and windows box lately without problems. Would like to get samba working! (Still haven't played with NFS) Again clear instruction on how to achieve this probably trivial thing are just lacking. What package to get?: >From a newbie perspective the debian choice can be overwhelming. I still didn't find a better way than apt-cache search to get packages that probably do what I want to do. I normaly guess what is appropriate but I would really appreciate a place where you can see: want to do this : this is the best tool. Finally I would just like to say that are truly enjoy the freedom Debian-linux now gives me: I somehow fell that I emerged from the MS matrix and now live in the free world. I think that if the Debian community put more efforts in documenting more with a DOTHIS than a HOWTO approach would help getting more people into Zion. That's it, thanks for reading __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
