...is out. It has 7 CDs

Anyone tried it yet? I bet it kicks ass!

7 freakin CD's? What is the deal with distros pumping out so many discs now?

You only need one CD, heck you don't even need that. You can install from half a dozen floppy discs and download the rest of the stuff you want on demand.

Debian just has an enormous number of packages available for it.

That is nuts!!!

I've tryed it and I must say it's great. Yes, you only need 1st cd, the other 6 are just binarys... All 7cd's contains over 8000 packages, so practicly, you don't need nothing more.

zeky

Cool, I am really not bashing when asking this...

What's so cool about debian? I haven't ever used it, and might try it out now.

What I like about debian is the fact that you can upgrade whenever a new version comes out over the net with no trouble at all.Also their package system is far better then rpm's - you always get everything you need installed - it's like a wonder.
On the downside - some of the software is 'old'; even in the new release there is no kde3 or gnome2 and stuff like that.
Their philosophy is that they release when they feel it's ready.
I am not sure but the defaultkernel for 3.0 might still be 2.2.19 because debian thinks the 2.4.series is not stable enough.

The 2.4.18 kernel is included in woody (3.0) you just have to pass bf2.4 when installing

My 2 cents worth

I did the network install of Woody a couple of days ago, and am using it on my 2nd Linux computer now. I have Slackware 8.1 on my main computer.

I am a Debian , but decided to give it a try because I like the idea of their packaging & updating system. I also like the broad software base it has. It seems like a perfect marriage to my broadband internet connection.

Compared to Slackware, the documentation seems even more disorganized. Since the distribution is more complicated than Slackware, I've had quite a few problems learning how to get the thing configured. I've never had much trouble with Slackware. In otherwords I feel Debian has a much steeper learning curve than even Slackware. Don't expect to be easily lead along like Mandrake/Redhat/SuSe does.

The network install did go very well. Once I figured out what I was doing. This seems to be the common theme for Debian over all.

I just was wondering where I might find some documentation on the Debian specific configuration applications that are hidden on this system. I keep running accross things like "update-alternatives" and "update-modules" which once I find them, there seems to be man pages for, but I just don't know where to go to get Debian specific things done in the first place.

Because of this I've had to resort to manually editing config files, which the comments in those files ask me NOT to do, but I just don't know any better.

I had to do this to get all my sysV runlevels straightened out (they were all the same!), and configure sound hardware. I've attempted to come up with something simular to Slackwares "xwmconfig" to select default window managers without going through xdm/gdm but I still can't get it to work. I had to download gdm and manually configure it, which did work. I guess there is still a lot to the structure of starting your X environment that I still don't know.

So far, the apt-get and dselect util has worked very well. I wonder if there is a text search thing I can use with this system to help me find what I need.

Once I find good Debian docs (if they actually exist) I'm sure I'll like my new Woody just fine. Slackware 8.1 is more up-to-date and better preconfigured "out-of-the-box" but their primitive packaging system makes it hard to maintain down-the-road. I've never gotten along well with RPM based distributions. I keep running into "dependency hell". Debians system so far seems to handle all this fairly well.

Oh, and one more reason for trying Debian. With Slackware (and a lot of others) if you want a stable system, it seems like you have to do a full 2 gigabyte install. With Debian, I've pretty much built a system that has the features I want with only about 600 mb. When ever I run across something I forgot to install, apt-get installs it for me.

Try to subscribe to the user mailing list for info and specific question.
Very good list but high volume (around 100-200 daily).For help i usually try help-xman first.
To find specific packages i use normally synaptic.Thats a frontend for apt-get that nobody but me seems to like.Other than that you can install galeon with the debian bookmarks or google for programm debian.
There is a lot of frontends:aptitude,synaptic,gnome-apt and others.Use the one you like.
There are also a lot of 'unofficial' sources for apps and the maintainers of important packages usually have their experimental builds,too (openoffice xfree4.2.0).
As far as installation is concerned:I never had a problem with any package i installed.I can't believe that rpm is so popular with something much better around.
And you shouldn't take the labels on the distros to serious 'unstable' is actually pretty stable.

Thanks for the good info.

Is this mailing list also part of a UseNet newsgroup? I really don't think I want 100-200 messages emailed to me daily, I'd rather browse them in a separate 'news' reader or web page thing.

I did install Galeon, which has become my favorite Linux browser for computers that can handle loading the Mozilla back end, (I.E. I run Opera on my aging 120mhz laptop) but I didn't find any debian bookmarks. What is the package I need to install to get these? (or do I just need to install a good Apt-get front end and find it myself)

An Apt-get front end would certainly help me out at this point. I'll give some of your suggestions a try.

Can you actually recommend a good 'unoffical' site for information on XFree 4.x? Like others, I sometimes have trouble getting it to work properley. But my biggest problem right now is that I don't understand a lot of distributions' (like Debian's ) method of selecting window managers. Slackware's method was one of simple symlink manipulation.

Good comment on the stability of the 'unstable' branch. One of the things that have kept me away from Debian was how out-of-date their distro's become. I've always been uneasy about trying anybody's 'unstable' or beta versions because I normally consider most people's 'stable' distributions (like Mandrake) too unstable for me.

My Slackware 8.0 was stable when I first installed it, but I tended to break a lot of it trying to keep Mozilla, Galeon, KDE, Nautilis, etc. up to date, and couldn't wait until 8.1 came out so I could start over again. I tended to break Redhat & Mandrake even faster. My hope is that I'll learn to do better with Debian.

Debian bookmarks:When you install galeon with a deb and run the 'first time druid' you can select debian bookmarks along with google an others.
A list of mirrors for unofficial deb's for XF4.2 by the official maintainer is at http://raw.no/x4.2/
Selecting a window manager is easy.By default debian installs xdm but can opt for kdm from kde too.I use windowmaker; from there you can change to any other windowmanager too.When you install a new one it gets added automatically to the windowmakermenu.If you use kdm it gets added on install - don't know about xdm.
If you need something that is not included in debian a googlesearch for the app and debian usually turns up a result.
The mailinglist is really good - better then the support I paid for from Suse.

Yea, I installed gdm, and it works fine when I use it. What I miss is Slackware's "xwmconfig" with is a simple little shell script that would just move a symlink around so that when I'm not using gdm/kdm/xdm, and thus at a run level that just gives me a bash prompt. I simply enter the command and it pops up a menu that allows me to select what wm I want to use by default when I type "startx". I thought that "update-alternatives --config x-window-manager" would do the same thing in Debian, but it didn't seem to work. No matter what I selected, startx always starts up Gnome/Sawfish. Am I somehow not using "update-alternatives" correctly?

Here's a tip - apt-get install debian-guide doc-debian install-doc newbiedoc less

Debian installs documentation for packages in /usr/share/doc/. Therefore you would probably find "debian-guide" in /usr/share/doc/debian-guide. Similarly, you would find documentation for X in /usr/share/doc/xserver-xfree86.

To read a README.gz, use zless.

Always read the README.Debian files as they contain information on Debian idiosyncrasies and special configuration details.

See above.
Also see http://www.debian.org/doc - there should be enough to keep you busy there

Might be worth a google for "site:www.debian.org topic".

Haven't used it, but what about selectwm?

[quote]So far, the apt-get and dselect util has worked very well. I wonder if there is a text search thing I can use with this system to help me find what I need.[quote]

apt-cache search foo and bar

That's what I love about Debian.

Ahh thanks, This is just help I needed.

I just installed all that stuff, and it looks like I've got some reading homework to do.

I also installed wmselect. I had to manually configure the thing which involved hunting up all my wm executables, but that was okay. I'll try it and see if it works as soon as I post this. It is the kind of thing I was looking for. Unfortunately it seems to be an X app which is a little bit of the cart-before-the-horse problem. (Slackware's xwmconfig is an ncurses whiptail kind of thing).

Hopefully soon, I'll be able to stop asking dumb questions and start giving intelligent answers to others.