"Henrik Johansson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > A final comment: > The install procedure is not half as hard as everyone > said! Refreshing actually!
Glad you found it that way. Personally, my experience has been less than good. (I'm still experimenting, and am by no means ready to give up yet.) I've run Linux since kernel 0.99pl13, and Red Hat since 4.2 I think, and am now seriously considering moving to Debian; it seems to be the local favorite among serious users. I'm running two internet servers, not a desktop workstation. So far, I've had three complete failures to get Debian to install, on two different systems (both of which installed fine with RedHat 7.3). On my third try on the second system, I've gotten an apparent install, except that it won't boot from the hard drive. Since I've got a rescue disk and a boot disk, and even a theory on what the problem is, I actually expect to get over this hurdle the next time I have time to work on it, maybe this weekend yet. The installation programs seem to be *very much* not ready for prime time, and the documentation is horrid; containing little useful information and none of the most important thing to document, namely the overall framework of how things *work* (which I need to know to debug anything that goes wrong). One thing that's helped a lot is falling back to stable. At least the documentation isn't outright *wrong* so often there. However, stable contains rather outdated things like perl 5.6.1; which is now old enough that the perl community is starting to tell me that the first thing I need to do is get to a more recent perl when I have trouble with things. The apt-get tool, from what little I've seen so far, is quite nice. I didn't find dependencies especially hard to manage in RedHat, though, and apt-get seems to sacrifice the *really really useful* rpm -ql and rpm -qf capabilities (asking for all the files in a package, and asking for what package a file came from). At least I haven't found how to do it yet. The layers of sources is *really good* design, and will make my life easier, and use less net bandwidth, and generally be a very good thing. As I say, despite having some troubles on the initial learning curve, I'm still favorably inclined and expect to eventually convert my systems to Debian. -- David Dyer-Bennet, <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/> RKBA: <http://noguns-nomoney.com> <http://www.dd-b.net/carry/> Photos: <dd-b.lighthunters.net> Snapshots: <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/> Dragaera/Steven Brust: <http://dragaera.info/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
