John, trust me - have a go at Mepis. It produces a Debian system via the World's Smoothest Installer TM - it's actually a window on the KDE desktop that you get from the live-CD install. If you've got the time to get their first iso, give it a spin - the 2nd disk is unnecessary.

Actually, the installer from the knoppix is pretty smooth as well.

The only reason that I have to work out what needs to be put in to my lilo.conf is because when the bloke from my LUG helped me set up the original debian install, pointed out the possible problems with running more than one version of lilo - though I'm not actually sure whether there would be a problem.

Logic dictates that if the install finds a lilo.conf, then surely it would overwrite it, and if the version that comes with debian is the same as the one that, comes with mandrake, then it is in the same place on the first sector of the hard drive.

I suspect that he was alluding to having a lilo.conf in both hda3 (the mandrake install) and hda4 (the debian install) and the possibility of conflict - not sure.

Thus far, there is only one version, found amongst my mandrake install. And as per the thread that I've started asking about that specifically, I am presuming that it should only be the initrd part that needs changing (well not including the label - but the services started at boot in the append part, should, I think, remain the same).

As you have probably worked out, I'm not very adventurous with my PC, the only reason for trying a HD install of knoppix is because when I have booted from the cd, it see's all the hardware (like mandrake), especially the cdrw, and knows that it needs the scsi emulation, whereas the normal debian install didn't, and it took me quite a while to work out that I needed it, and how to get it working - a total pain.

there's still some stuff to work out, as I got a small mountain of I/O errors during the install - not sure why, probably the quality of the disc that I burned to (I never did manage to check the Md5 sum, but it did boot from the disc). Some of the errors I understood, because the app names rang a bell, but some of them where a complete mystery.

We'll see what happens - cos if it goes to rat shit, I'll be starting a blizzard of posts/threads asking more stupid questions.

regards

John

I'm real glad LinuxQuestions finally has a Debian forum! (I need it!)

I've used all kinds of distro's RH, Mandrake, Slackware, etc., including some BSD's. I love Slackware except for it's primitive package handling and somewhat small (well compared to Debian at least) software base.

The "fancy" Debian derived distro's like Knoppix, Libranet, Lindows, Xandros, Corel, etc., are typically easy to install, but what I like about Debian is that I can start with a floppy disk or two and do a network install of just the components I want, then easily keep them up-to-date.

My problem with Debian is that like Slackware, there is not much in the way of GUI install or configuration tools in the base install. Unlike Slackware, which expects you to manually set things up. (which is mostly a good thing), Debian has all these slick systems to do things like selecting which ftp server you want to use or X-session manager (the "alternatives" system), or the method it uses keep your window manager menus up-to-date. These are usually terse command line utilities that seem to work quite well once you learn them. My problem has been that I need a short concise listing of these "Debian specific" commands and mechanisms so I can learn them instead of trying to configure things manually (the Slackware way) only to have my changes wiped out the next time I do a major "apt-get upgrade"

A better install manual for Debian would be good too, something along the lines of the 'BSD install manuals would be great. The current official one seems to tell you how it can be done, but not step-by-step how to do it. There is a big difference.

It took me a week of asking questions about how to start an "Unstable" or "Testing" installer until I learned that no working ones existed (this was some time ago and the Sarge install disks led me on a wild goose chase). I finally did a Woody-base + "distro-upgrade" to get there which seemed to be the standard way this was done. This all worked perfectly, but the fact that I had to do it this way validates those who claim Debian is hard to install.

All that said, I'm liking Debian more and more the more I use and learn it, but I do think it is hard to install (at least "pure" Debian, not those nice derived distros) and hard to learn all their utilities.

I found Official net install images for the "testing" release(http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/netinst/) that work great it is like all the other install, it have a little GUI
Yeah It is not possible to use these images to install the stable release. BUt it work great.....



The images are only intended for testing the new installer for sarge. The installer is still under development, so the installation may fail.

The only issue i had it did not find my Nic but that was easy to fix...
I ran SUSe for a couple of year but got piss off i could not install thing went to Debian testing two day later running Debain Sid...
Not going back now....