On Friday 04 November 2005 12:43, Anthony Anson wrote:
I've just had an attempt at installing Woody, but fell at, if not the first hurdle, the next one.
Hey, reading through your experiences on this thread, maybe you could try SuSE or ubuntu as an aside - either of which is likely to suit you if you don't like having to examine lots of minutiae during installation and prefer to start off with a functional system, and it can't hurt to try.
I'm just about to put one of these 4 quintigigillion ubuntu disks to use and install it myself on an nth partition somewhere, actually.
If you do decide to stick with Debian, however, I suspect you'll be glad you did.
It's a choice between the quick fix and the One True GNU/Linux (which I still maintain despite my dirty little affair with SuSE*) :)
With 640 MB of memory I didn't think a swap partition was necessary so I skipped that. (Anyone disagree?)
Definitely - to pick a figure from the ether, if you go for about 2 gigs, you won't regret it :)
When you run your GNU/Linux with one of the heavier desktop environments, it can get uber memory-intensive at times.
Formatting the drive was not what you would call intuitive, though. I 'deleted' [1] all the existing partitions on hda, couldn't print the 'help' menu [2], found that using the command letters didn't do anything except return me to the formatting page, and I could find no way of implementing the changes I had made.
You say you were using cfdisk and worked this out, but not how. People with the same problem reading/googling the list could benefit from being told that pressing W for "write" at the main screen to commit the changes you've made :)
I understand that the latest version is a lot more user-friendly.
Maybe - the versions of cfdisk I've used certainly are. It's not very good if you find clui's counterintuitive, though.
[1] altered the hda1 FAT32; hda2 FAT16; hda3 Fat16 to a single unformatted partition awaiting the command to format. [2] the line at the bottom which said 'print help' or something similar had a cursor at the end of it, but I couldn't find any way of moving it or highlighting the lot, or getting it to work.
So I removed the CD and shut down.
I have a feeling that this is going to be a long job...
How're things progressing? :-) Well I hope...
Hey - just a last thought, if you decide to have a go at ubuntu, could you get a second machine into IRC? It might be quite cool to install and set it up together.
Maybe we should have an alug installfest at some point....
Anyway, later, may the FOSS be with you.
*Life gets boring without variety, and having done the nonfunctional->functional transition, I feel the need now to start with a preconfigured system and bork it myself.
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Ten