At last Thursday's Norwich meet I was nudged into trying Debian. I dunno why I hadn't done it earlier - too many other things to think about maybe. Partly, I'd been put off by the fact so many Debian users are experts and few seem to like GUIs. Anyway, my SuSE 9.0 is now behind the wave; I wanted a 2.6 kernel and KDE3.2, so rather than pay the cash to upgrade it seemed worth a go.
So I downloaded the Sarge netinst CD image and fired it up (on a spare machine of course). I have to say the installer is just about the easiest I've ever experienced (other than on Macs), which came as a surprise considering how Debian is always touted as the geek's distro. After a couple of tries - finger trouble etc - I got to feel the default package set was a little too rich for my taste. I don't want Gnome, for example. So I tried again, this time requesting that no additional packages be installed. This left me with a minimal installation, so I asked apt to find me KDE, figuring that would probably suck in everything it depends on. Almost right, but I still had to get the X system as well. After running xf86config and another couple of false starts I had KDE2 running smoothly. That's a day and a half, and not even full-time at that. So far, the only (slightly) adverse comments I have are:
1. In the standard installation it appears to be impossible to get into KDE as root. The login page simply refuses to do it. This seems excessively paranoid to me.
2. I have yet to see the equivalent of YAST for overall system configuration. Maybe the bits of it are squirrelled away in the new KDE, which I haven't fully explored. Is there a separate GUI-based system configurator?
3. When running xf86config it suggested my mouse driver is most likely to be /dev/mouse. Fine, except that driver doesn't exist. I expect it's only a symbolic link but nothing told me what to point it at. After some scratching I tried /dev/psaux and all was well.
So, I guess you can say 'another convert'. Now I need to load it up with everything I can think of, run it for a week or two then hopefully take the plunge and do my main PC.
Finally, as I type this I've been installing OpenOffice, but it's just crapped out, warning "setting locale failed" and asking me to check my locale settings. How do I do that?
-- GT