n01getsout.com’s blog

My hard drive crashed and I was again left with the proposition of re-installing Windows. I have used Linux in the past and have dabbled with Debian in virtual machines. I read a great book about Debian called The Debian System written by Martin Krafft which convinced me that Debian was the right Linux distribution for me (where is Ubuntu’s Social Contract?). I highly recommend this book for anyone who is even slightly interested in Debian. After looking at what software I had that was Windows only, I finally decided that I don’t play Half-Life 2 that much and I could live without Dreamweaver. I made the switch.

I downloaded the netinst CD from the daily build image section on the Debian-Installer page. I used this one because it would automatically install the testing distribution and has the new graphical installer on it and I wanted to check it out. I burnt it on a CD-RW and booted up. Please note that you have to type “installgui” to use the new graphical installer. Installation went very smooth and I soon was installing Xfce4 and my other favorites. It’s very nice to see that Debian had the latest release of Xfce in testing and I didn’t have to configure APT to use os-cillation, which actually has an older version.

The first thing I noticed about Debian testing was that it did not include any version of Screem or VLC. I assume this is normal in testing (hence the name), but I find it odd that both stable and unstable would contain software that testing did not. Another thing that I found intolerable was one of the udev configuration scripts would rename lo, my loopback device, to lo_temp_temp. I found that if I deleted /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules and rebooted, it would be named lo_temp (so it got rid of one of the _temp). I could not figure out any way to get rid of the other one and Google gave me no answers, so I just updated to unstable. It solved both problems I was having and has been running smoothly ever since.

As far as hardware goes, I installed the newest driver for my ATI Radeon 9000 and got it working properly after I finally figured out what I was supposed to do. Alsa correctly identified my Soundblaster Audigy LS but due to the beta status of the driver, I only get sound out of my front two speakers and sometimes the sound has static and pops.
All in all, I have a happiness with my operating system that I have not felt since I first installed Windows 2000 many years ago. I have a fast, stable system without bloat. Despite a few rough areas, I feel that I will be happily using Debian on my Desktop for years to come.