The message 436C7821.7080609@northtrack.net from Nick Atkins nicka@northtrack.net contains these words:
<>>> Installing Debian is like being greased, and wrestling with an eel.
Installing Debian imho does not have to be difficult, the new installer under Sarge should drag you through it quickly and easily.
That does *NOT* apply to Woody - it's about as easy to understand as a difficult to understand thing.
I'd like to say more but very quickly, if you use the /quiet switch when istalling Debian you will get very few questions and a quick install.
Even if I'd known what to do with it, no command line facility presented itself. It was vaguely similar to a Windows installation, but immeasurably cruder, and expected you to know things that no mortal not in possession of of a bucket of chicken entrails could possibly understand, let alone know.
It is only by the best of fortune that I knew what graphics card was in the box - because I put said box together from a carcase and a pile of bits, and that was one of the things I had to get a driver for.
I use a floppy / minimum cd install followed by anything else required over the net.
Yes. It wanted to connect by some arcane method (Leafnode?) which I couldn't configure because I didn't have the necessary addresses, living as I do in the 21st century, and indeed, earlier, to get it to go on, I had to tell it fibs about my ISP's 0808 number, and then disconnect the modem when it tried to dial out to 'get security updates' or something.
To get the latest packages first time around I use a large http proxy at my firewall / gateway and so the latest packages are stored locally for any machine that needs them, this way you can mess up the install and trash it time and time again and get back to where you were very easily, to get your packages via http your apt sources list might look like this:
Nice - but I'm on dial-up.
deb http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/debian/ stable main contrib non-free deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
Which leaves me none the wiser even if better informed.
<digressing slightly> To look for and download the latest packages nightly (including security updates) I run the following crontab entry which then sends me an email letting me know what has been downloaded ready for install, the crontab entry looks like this:
# Look for updates daily 0 3 * * * (apt-get update && apt-get -dy upgrade) | mail -s "`hostname` update" nicka
Hope this is of interest to someone, Nick
<whine>
I just want to free myself from the shackles of the Evil Umpire, not to get a PhD in Arcane Mathemagics...
</whine>