I installed Debian (several times) and dpkg'd my way into KDE where i am now typing to you all

this adventure has taught me that i'm apparently brain damaged.
so i am very excited to be here.

barry

Linux will give you dain bramage, but it will eventually heal itself.

Hey Barry,

The brain damage bit, I'm with you there mate.

In my case, I got "woody" installed (ish), but only the base packages - the bastard wouldn't even start my "x" server, fortunately a friend from my LUG knows shit loads of stuff about debian, and he came over and set things up so it was a basic install - though I had to upgrade the distro to "Sarge", the standard kernel bit, for woody wouldn't recognize my graphics card - so he upgraded the kernel for me, leaving me with some "minor config stuff" to do (alledgedly).

The lying bastard - I got basic kde 2.2 installed with "apt-get", but had to get help to learn the dpkg thing to get opera installed. Oh and I saw that kde 3.1.3 is available (sort of) for debian - it only took me about 10 days (with a fair bit of help) to get the upgrade sorted.

Now all I have to do to get things finished, is work out why the cdrw device won't play an audio cd, and find out how to get both my printers (1 inkjet and 1 laser) working, and I want the "flash player" facility so I can have a good laugh at sites like this one (you should try it, especially the songs set to flash animations)

But like the distro, the brain damage is free, and thats just the start of it, you should have available the following:

Cigarettes (if you don't smoke then start - you'll see why)

Coffee (nuclear grade - too keep you awake at night when you are trying to suss things out that don't want to work quite the way you think they should)

and some booze - bourbon should suffice (for when you are stressed with it)

But, make sure that there are no large, heavy, blunt objects to hand, because you're bound to get to the stage that you want to beat the crap out of it!

regards

John

Actually quite the contrary happens. Your brain doesn't heal itself, it only gets more and more damaged as you become more "adept". Finally you reach the point where you're convinced (deluded) that opensource software is somehow superior to commercial software.

Signs of this aberrant behavior include staying up all hours of the night trying to get X to run at the proper refresh rate, bragging to your friends about your awesome uptime, and getting *really* excited when TuxRacer runs above 20 fps on your "rock solid" 66 MHz Pentium.

Eventually you become so deranged that you start contributing to the madness yourself by frequenting sites like LQ and freshmeat all the time. It's quite sad really.

LOL! Genius, sheer genius!

I found that banging my head against a brick wall repeatedly was tremendously head clearing when I was learning Debian. Electric shock therapy using a pair of forks and a power outlet worked well in undoing all my Red Hat learning and previous Windows experience to make advances in said Debian learning.

I'm in the same vote, with the problems I have, the time it takes to solve them and how hard I find it to get help. I too am getting brain damage, mine keeps getting worse and worse though. My brain is so damaged that I'm thinking ofgoing back to windows if things don't improve for me.

Don't do that - sooner or later it'll all fall into place and you'll be glad you're here =)

Do this every time you have a problem. Go into /usr/share/doc

Then go into the directory that matches the package you are having issues with.

More than likely the answer is in there. And this forum is much more helpful than debianhelp.org IMHO...

I am 100% with you, guys.

My brain signals are conspicuously changing.

And my wife (and all the rest) simply understand

NOTHING


A new (from today) Debianite convert (from RH / Fedora )