I've been using mandrake for maybe a month now, I had a friend download the Sarge CD set for me. I'm getting tired of an automated linux that does everything for you, I want to learn linux. Mandrake was my first distrobution. Is there anything I should know before downloading. I'll be dual-booting on a compaq presario laptop

I have been learning by trial and error (and a lot of google), its just practice, if you really want to learn, download a couple other distros, and reinstall them all until you can configure them all right.

I myself went from using Mandrake on a laptop (IBM) to using Debian. I have three suggestions for you:

• Save your Mandrake configuration files somewhere. Mainly the files in /etc are important. This will allow you to see what Mandrake did to get stuff to work if they don't work "out of the box" in Debian.
• Search on the web for someone with your laptop-type that has Linux up and running, preferrably Debian. If you have a problem, chances are that someone else already had that problem and solved it.
• Have a Knoppix CD available. While not being strictly Debian, Knoppix is good at getting stuff to work, and you can see how Knoppix configure things and then adopt that to your situation.

Good luck. You won't regret your decision.

/TLV

Thanks, I'll take that into account. The set of Sarge CDs was downloaded before about a month ago. How long will an apt-get update, apt-get upgrade take on a 56k modem after Sarge goes stable?

EDIT: I also have a broadcom wi-fi radio that's built in. Has anyone had any sucess using it under debian? I've heard of ndiswarpper but I don't know what it does.

It could be some significant time. I don't remember specifically what has been updated, but I do know that OpenOffice was updated and it is usually a big package. Though your copy of Sarge should work without any problems (on a home-desktop).

I would try to get access to a high-speed internet connection, either to get the latest ISOs, or to do the update when you're done. The updates have slowed down the last weeks as they stopped accepting new packages. As a healthy alternative, you could be very selective in the packages you want to install.

/TLV

OK, I installed the debian base system with the command linux26 apci=off because I was having problems even booting into the installer.

Now when I try to boot into debian so I can set it up it acts like is going to boot then reads

then it just stops, it won't boot. That was the same message it gave me when I tried jsut to intsall with linux26

I don't remember if I had any specific boot-options when installing, nor am I familiar with the new installer...

So, you managed to install Debian, but you cannot boot into Debian after installation because it stops after a while? Hmm, it may be helpful to check /var/log/dmesg and /var/log/syslog for clues as to what is going wrong.

So how do you access those log-files? That's where the Knoppix CD gets handy. Boot into Knoppix, mount your harddrive and check the files. You can post the relevant info here and we can try to figure it out.

I assume you had ACPI working in Mandrake - though ACPI on laptops has been, and is, a very shaky area. APM works better.

BTW: You did type "linux26 acpi=off" and not "linux26 apci=off", right?

/TLV