Where it needs work/Questions

1. The Bootloader

GRUB would'nt allow me to boot into WinXP and totally messed up my MBR, causing me to have to spend a day reconfiguring my computer (formatting everything) in every way imaginable. Next time, I'm installing the bootloader on a floppy

2. USB Mass Storage support

I'm sure it recognizes my USB Mass storage drive (Woody did), but I cannot for the life of me find the mount point (or how to mount it that is)

Question: How/where do I mount it?

3. My Windows NTFS Partitions

I cannot find how to mount my WinXP NTFS partitions. When I do "mount /dev/hda1" it says "cannot find /dev/hda1 in fstab or mtab".

Question: How/where do I mount it?

4. WLan card

It doesn't recognize my D-Link DWL-520 (rev. D -- the one with the RTL8180 chip). Of course this seems to be a problem with all Linux distros

Question: Anyone gotten it to work?

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Where it rocks out loud (no questions):

1. Kernel 2.6

It's the only distro I've installed so far (of course I've only ever installed Mandrake 9.1/9.2/10, Fedora 1, and Debian Woody/Sarge) that allows you to install with a 2.6 kernel

2. GUI

Is it just me or is the KDE interface more attractive in Debian?

3. Programs

It has a lot of programs I had never heard of.

4. Monitor/Vid Card

Woody didn't support my ATI Radeon 9600SE, but Sarge supports it because it has XFree86 4.3

5. TeaCooker

It's just fun randomness

6. Apt-Get

The holy grail of Debian

7. A whole crapload of other stuff which I really don't feel like remembering because I only had Debian for about 1 hour.

I installed Sarge with no problems, and Grub didn't even come close to ruining my MBR. I doubt the problem was with Grub, though it could have been. Making a boot floppy is always good (in case something goes wrong, you can use it to get the machine up so you can repair it), but don't fall back on it to boot linux - that way lies frustration and anger (which lead to the dark side ).

If there's no line in /etc/fstab, then you need to be more verbose about mounting. Try this:
mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows
(/mnt/windows must exist before this command runs)
Once you've got things mounting and you've chosen a place to put it, add a line to your fstab file to describe it. If you add 'auto' in the options section, the partition will be mounted at boot time.

And yeah, apt-get kicks ass The only other system I thought was as nice was the BSD ports system (though I've not yet tried gentoo's emerge).

usb flash drives are enumerated as scsi devices

sometimes it is /dev/sda, sometimes it is /dev/sda1, etc. use trial and error to find the proper device.

I'm trying it out as (hopefully) an alternative to Fedora Core 2 and so far I am really impressed. The installation process was relatively a pain (though it went nice and smoothly so I cannot complain), apt is of course very nice, and I haven't had any nasty issues yet. I'm going to try it on my dual-CPU system, where Fedora's kernel gives me various problems that I'm hoping Debian won't have

I don't know (or care) about KDE, but Debian's Gnome install was pleasantly nice and 'stock' and clean. Some distros like to mess with Gnome a lot, here everything was pretty much left alone.

Yeah, i'd be suprised if grub was the problem. I've installed debian all over the place and never seen it have a problem with grub. Prolly coulda posted your menu.lst in here and we could told you how to configure it. or atleast repaired the mbr with a windows disk to get back to windows without re-installing windows.

the realtek8180L drivers are utter garbage.... That is why they are not implimented into the linux kernel or any distro. Realtek's devs thought it would be cute to make a driver that works all by itself in a very stand alone'ish manner. So if you can manage to compile it on something other than an obsolete version of redhat. You get to use all of it's own little scripts to use it. And the scripts aren't even done well. Use ndiswrapper for that chipset.

By me the usb device was /dev/sdb1 don't ask me why.

i think the enumeration depends on what usb bus channel the drive is connected to (of course all of that is transparent to the user from a hardware-perspective. the only way to tell what channel it is on is in software). you can also watch "/var/log/messages" (kernel messages) to see how connected devices are enumerated.