OK, so I finally got my laptop back from the repair shop yesterday, and,
too my obvious horror, my Linux partitions had been deleted, and I just
had one big fat Win95 install. Vowing to make the best of the situation,
I decided to try Debian, instead of just reinstalling Redhat. I made the
17 install disks for 2.2, booted up, and started downloading. The install
was a breeze. Apt-get is amazing. But I do have a few problems with
Debian:
1) The default install has some obvious things missing. (I did the
default install cus I was feeling lazy.) For one, it's missing important
devel libraries, such as the ncurses static libraries. This seems like
something that should be included in the base install. That's just one
example; there are others.
2) Doesn't configure X during install. This doesn't bother me,
but I can see where a new user would be pretty freaked just looking at a
command prompt.
3) Dselect is weird. This is just a personal thing; I know some people
love dselect, but I'm having issues with it. For example, even if I tell
it to just grab one package, it ends up wanting to grap 35mb worth of
shit. What I'm doing right now is just using dselect to find packages,
then getting them with apt-get.
Just my first impression. Debian certainly seems to be a cleaner system,
but Redhat's definitely easier to set up.
- --
Nathan Saper
natedog@well.com (PGP)
nsaper@sprintpcs.com (cell phone, no PGP)
http://www.well.com/user/natedog/
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